Pretty "meh" showing at Moto this year for Hyperpolarized. The first fight was awesome, but one of the huge impacts damaged my weapon controller internally, which caused it to fail intermittently. This meant I thought it was working against Marathon, but it failed to start 5/6 tries.
I spent most of the day Saturday troubleshooting the intermittent controller issue, including doing some load testing in the pit without the shell that I think damaged my weapon belt. The weapon belt gave up the ghost in my third fight against Crmison Snow, but survived long enough for me to get the win.
My fourth fight was against Jamison with MegatRON. I can barely beat him on a good day, and with the issues I was having up to this point I doubted this was going to be one of those. I was right - further weapon belt issues caused the weapon to die after he bashed me into the wall for a minute or so and I tapped out.
In my last fight I faced Emulsifier. If the bot was working 100% I think I had a shot at him, though he had the thing super dialed in this year. Unfortunately I only had the one spare belt, and I had just killed it against Megatron so no spin means no win for me. KO after the first hit when I landed upside down.
I'm pretty sure the belt issues were because the drawing I used to replace that frame rail included the wrong spacing for the weapon motor. I fixed it manually last year by remaking the part, but apparently even though I thought I updated the drawing I had not. That meant extra slack (about .040" to short on the center distance!) and that meant dead belts when I smack stuff hard enough. Naturally my spin tests at home couldn't show that problem. I'll need a more thorough testing mechanism.
Videos are here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS-2IRfn6lw&list=PLATw5d_vDtZmzA1yijgG_b02UlzoBphZZI think I basically have to fix a little damage from the Emulsifier hit and maybe grind/rework the teeth a little from accumulated wear, and fix the belt thing and I'm back in business. Alas, another year to wait...
-Zac
