Check out this fight in BattleBots: Bounty Hunters - Witch Doctor (Season 1, Episode 9)
Bounty Hunters? Bounty Hunters! This is a new format for Battlebots, with a “star” bot posing as the bounty, and 8 challengers fighting in a bracket for the chance to take them on. We were placed into the Witch Doctor bounty, with a first-round match against rookies Slap Box. We were familiar with their test-bed for Slap Box, having fought it with our 30lb Sportsman robot ‘BEEESS??’. They had a regular-season that was hard to learn from, losing competitively to Tombstone before knocking out Sharko and having their third scheduled fight against Pain Train cancelled. They looked like a tough box with exposed wheels, a very powerful lifter, and not too many ways to reach up and hurt us.
Having seen a couple horizontal spinners in our bracket, and in the spirit of experimenting with new parts, we decided to utilize our new Tegris wheels and legs to see how they perform in the Battlebox. While we wouldn’t normally use them for a robot like Slap Box, having them mounted would save a lot of time when preparing for upcoming fights, if we were to make it that far. We also needed the weight savings of the tegris support legs to accommodate the weight of some pulley changes we made (in an attempt to improve spinup speed).
Just before the fight, one of the Slap Box builders told us about their wheel hubs, which were made from a stiffer cast plastic than the rubber that they cast around them, to form the wheels. It’s a pretty unique way of making an expendable external part like that cheaply… but he also said how brittle they turned out to be. Noted!
Our goal of aiming for the wheels worked out early, and paid off late. We struggled to bash through Slap Box’s front armor until the closing moments of the fight, when one of our hits peeled the top plate up and killed their robot. Considering how close the fight was, we took the opportunity to smash another wheel off and seal the victory for ourselves. The judges gave us the victory, and we moved on in the bracket!
Photo Gallery
HUGE with new tegris wheels & legs
Slap Box’s configuration, with a long barbed lifting arm
Knocking off a wheel on the first hit of the fight
Photo Credit: Dan Longmire