Team Pun-Chant and Nelly the Ellybot enter the Battle Box to fight Rainbow – Credit JCRB Photography





To L.A.. A bot-fighting quintet came…

They brought a mechanical elephant, and Nelly was her name…

Aaaaaaaaaaaand got twatted in the face by a multicoloured spinner.

I mean, if you’re gonna go down.. You’ve gotta go down in style, right? And what a marvelous way to blow up. The audience were either out of their seats or covering their eyes in horror. The fan group I help run has been flooded with memes about exploding faces, surpassing even #floorgate. The eye jokes are getting cornea by the day…

……I’ll get my coat.

Bonk

So! She kinda blew up didn’t she! That wedge fed Rainbow’s bar right up into the sacrificial plastic and her face was splatted all over the arena. It looked so bad that Chris Rose was desperately asking her to show him some kind of sign that she was okay. “CAN YOU SEE ME NELLY??” He shouts, arms flapping wildly as his concern for her grows. It’s somewhat clear at this stage that my blind – nay, ‘decapitated’ elephant, is incapable of responding to him. But his optimism is nonetheless appreciated. Not so happy about the cup of tea I snorted when he did it though.

You owe me a new keyboard Chris!

The sacrificial plastic was an excellent plan until Rainbow’s bar sliced through a battery lead and we lost drive. BOO! Our weapon was still working, and that last hit thoroughly borked Rainbow’s weapon system. Alas, our drive was borked, and we could not show the ref any movement.

So we got outside after the fight… At this stage, we had no idea that it was just a battery lead that caused us to stop. The damage looked SO BAD, so we assumed the worst.

So Tom Brewster and Rory Mangles from Monsoon casually walk over. We’re scratching our heads – fighting with the sudden adrenaline comedown – convinced it’s terminal. Post-fight shock if you will.

“Be fine!” Tom says cheerfully, and told us that as bad as it looked, it didn’t look as bad as what Son of Whyachi did to Monsoon, and they came back from that. So we start to calm down a bit, and start bouncing ideas off with Rory. It’s good to remind oneself that creative repairs are half the fun of this sport. (They are, I swear.)



“I thought that went really well……”

Suffice to say, none of the plastic on Nelly’s head survived the fight. The 3D printed googly eyes were pretty much obliterated, and we kissed goodbye to one of the aluminium bulkheads.

F

One of the weapon bulkheads was damaged, but fixable. (Thanks Lincoln!) We also had to have a chain path cut into it because we couldn’t get one of the bends out and it was rubbing on the chain. (Thanks Tormach!) The hammer arm was bent, but still usable. The mace was undamaged. The wedge was cracked on one of the bends, and had a nice gouge in the front. Lincoln welded up that crack.

…phrasing, Sarah.

Byebye

Inspection of her internal organs showed that nothing was damaged except for the battery wire which killed our drive. This was nice, as the organs are the more expensive parts. All in all this fight cost us $90 in new plastic. We *could* have made a new bulkhead out of aluminium, but given that our next fight was [spoilers], and still on a tight budget, plastic was the way to go..

New bulkhead

New heads!

So all in all, about a day’s hard grafting and a frustrating amount of time waiting for the new plastic to arrive. We noticed in the fight that the clutch on the weapon was slipping, and so we tightened that up in preparation for the next fight. Chewie from the Skorpios team had a pair of giant googly eyes, and kindly donated them to us. We had some issues getting the wedge back on in time for the next fight, and so hastily put the forks-wedge on instead. (Minus the forks. Cos #Floorgate.)

We ran with the story that Nelly had visited the pet cemetary and was back from the dead. I can’t reveal the full extent of her repair job just yet, but here is a sneak preview of one of the new googly eyes..

….bonk?

At the time of writing, I cannot reveal who our next opponent is. But I will leave you with the clue that it is a fight we jokingly suggested to production, and earned me the nickname of “glutton for punishment” by most of the crew.