Underground Robot Street
Fight
2-7-99
How did this event get started?
Well Team S.L.A.M. got tired of
waiting for an event to happen.
So My father challenged Jim Smentoski
creator of Hecules to a fight.
Jim was cool enough to accept and
said that he would try and find some other robots and their teams and ask
them to attend.
Jim was able to get La Machine
,Ginsu , Do-all ,Voltarc ,Junior. Unfortunately Hercules burnt up a motor
controller the night before so it couldn't attend.
Trey from La Machine got channel
5 KPIX from San Francisco to bring a camera crew and film the event.
Nice Job Guy's
Getting there was half the fun
for us
As things go (usually wrong) we
had a few challenges in getting S.L.A.M to operate correctly. Since the
completion of the rotator we started having radio receiver problems there
was just too much metal around the antenna. Since my father and the robot
live about 75 miles away I went over on Saturday to find a new home for
the antenna. The only place where it could be mounted was in the shaft
that supports the rotator. The first attempt failed because the glue wouldn't
dry fast enough and I was in a hurry. And then of course when I plugged
in the receiver battery there was a wire fire due to a pinched wire against
the frame under a tie wrap ARRRGH. Well any ways I ended working
on the problems until 2:00 am. I went to bed and was woken up at 4:45 am.
It was time to load the truck and leave for Novato. This is a 5 hour drive
on a good day.
Whole Lot of bad weather
When we left Quincy Calif. it was
snowing slush ice. It rained all the way down the Feather river canyon
you could barely see the road. Then we got to Marysville Calif. the wind
was blowing about 40 kts. and raining which it continued to do all the
way to the Bay Area. A lovely 250 mile trip.
We made it. YEAH!!
We got to Trey's house (home of
La Machine) about 10:00 am and were told that we probably would not get
to run because of the weather. So it was decided to go to breakfast and
talk about the situation...
Unbelievably while we were eating
the weather started to clear (Thank you Lord). So now began quick preparations
to get ready to rumble. Parts added quickly. Battery's fast charging
and the TV camera crew was called.
Then after some television production
stuff we all went to the secrete battleground...