1. The place where we all work has been more than a bit crazy lately. Dave no longer operates from the same department as the rest of us, and has no time to devote to the robot as a result of his new job - good luck mate, hope it works out for you. The rest of us are so flat out at work that we no longer have any time left for robot building. This, above all else, is THE fundamental problem at the moment.

2. Eviscerator is virtually 100% sponsored. The component cost of building the robot is in excess of £2000 and without sponsors the robot simply cannot be built. Unfortunately some people make promises they cannot keep (for whatever reason), and true to this some of our sponsors have let us down.

3. An enormous number of entries into RW'99 has meant that the programme makers (Mentorn) are operating trials to find the best robots for the show. Even if we had managed to throw something together, it would probably not have been of sufficient quality to get in. Anyway, we/I don't like to do things badly - I would rather not enter at all than enter a piece of tat :)

So, here we are - a robot design and a half-started build. We have about one third of the components we needed (after having been promised all the components by various companies and people) and no time.

Anyone want to buy a project?

Seriously though, it's been a real learning experience for me. I've managed a few projects at work now and this has to have been the toughest :) Who knows, circumstances might change for the better and then we can pick up where we left off. 

Thanks go out to all our sponsors who DIDN'T let us down and to the people who have emailed us to express their support (and compliment the web site). Building a robot for Robot Wars is a massive task, and without you all we would not have got as far as we have.

Marcus

PS

Special thanks to U-Net for hosting this website. I've had a few people emailing me asking me how I've found U-Net as a service provider and web host. I can honestly say that U-Net have been amazingly good. Their tech-support guys are brilliant and the overall level of service is top notch. In fact, as a result of the excellent service we have received I made a recommendation to use U-Net as ISP for the company I work for. This was accepted and passed and we now use U-Net for dialup and web-hosting, not least because U-Net came in at nearly half the price of some of it's competitors.