May 2017
We're lucky, we have some local friends who own some farmland with a solid stone barn at one side. They also just happened to have a good supply of plywood sheets so once we'd got the weapon bar we were able to build a dance floor for Tauron and carry out some proper weapon and drive testing.
We took an old filing cabinet and washing machine and spent the Bank Holiday weekend destroying them; have a look at the video to see what happened (note we were standing safely a long way away behind a wall, and filming with a GoPro on a tripod). It was pretty clear that Tauron was very destructive indeed, but the gyroscopic effect meant that steering with the weapon at full speed was very hard, so Tim and Tom would need to coordinate the weapon spin-up and steering very carefully.
It was great to be able to add video of this to our application for series 10. With this and the hits Tauron took from Tornado, we could prove that we had a reliable, robust robot with a very effective weapon. So we put together the application video, sent it off and waited...
...And as you know by now, our application was successful - Tauron was accepted for Robot Wars again, this time as a reserve. We set off up to Glasgow with no guarantee that he'd actually get in the arena, but from previous experience we knew what can go wrong at the last minute, so we were pretty hopeful Tauron mk2 would get a chance to show what he could do.