Last updated 04 November 1999
Well we are back from the wars and I am sad to report it was a disaster for Díotóir yet again. Poor Díotóir seems to be plagued by bad luck and bad timing. I mean he works fine everywhere but Robot Wars. A little bit like Razer I think ;). Anyway, here's what happened.
After last years incident with customs, we decided to leave Díotóir open for inspection and we would put the finishing touches when we got there. At least that was the theory. After driving all day and all night we arrived at the studio to be told that we would be next to fight and we had ten minutes to get our robot in fighting form. We managed to stretch the ten minutes to two hours, but it wasn't enough. We finished what we needed to do, put on the fur and face, popped Díotóir on the weigh-in scales and....6Kg overweight!! How did that happen??? We couldn't believe it. Either their scales was out, our scales was out or the laws of physics are different between London and Dublin.
So, minutes to go before the fight and we have to lose 6Kg in a hurry. The armour on top of the robot weighs about 6Kg so the quickest way to lose the weight was to remove the armour. Not as bad as it sounds because niether of the two robots (yes they have three robots in each opening battle now) that we had to fight had any kind of axe so the lack of top armour shouldn't be a problem. Ok so we've lost the weight and we're ready for battle....and the director breaks for lunch. Great! We now have an hour to tweak our beast (one hour is not enough to do anything better with the 6Kg though)
Out to the test area we go to test the settings on the weapon. Díotóir's weapon consists (basically) of an arm with a hinge on one end and two large car suspension springs on the other end. An hydraulic ram compresses the springs with about 3 tons of pressure and then when another robot is on the arm we let go of the springs. A forklift chain connects the springs to the ram. Well, there are a number of settings that must be adjusted for this to work properly as you can imagine and two of these are the length of the chain and how far the hydraulic ram pulls the chain. If either of these are wrong, either the chain snaps or the springs wont lock.
The chain snapped! S**t! Grab a new chain quick! The new chain is slightly too long! S**t! S**t! Modify the the weapon so the new chain fits...done...quick test, only 5 minutes to go....forgot to set the hydraulics for the newly modified weapon in the panic....chain snaps! S**t! S**t! S**t! Grab a new chain quick!....no time, we're on! F**k!
And so, with no armour, no weapon, no sleep and no hope we went to battle. We lasted about 4 seconds. We got flipped upsidedown straight away and as our weapon is also our re-righting device, there was nothing we could do about it. We were then fair game for the house robots. Díotóir, once the pride of Ireland, on his back getting torched, punched and slashed like a wounded wildebeast being ravished by vultures.
Well that was the end of our brief existance in Robot Wars 4th war. We did however go on and save some face in the Celebrity Special show, get trashed in the Sumo and play a respectable game of pinball.
Díotóir will return!