Ok so Christmas came and I spent most of my time in the basement after making a rash decision to rebuild KC1 for Wilson's Day 2001.

The problem was KC1 was overweight by about 1.6 kgs for the middleweight class, and I wanted to raise the gearing to about 12:1, add some weapons, etc...

There was no way I was going to get this done without some radical surgery, so out came the scalpel. I removed the drive motors, controllers, failsafes and all the expensive bits from KC1, leaving the now empty chassis as a bizarre day glow footstool.

The old chassis with Armour weighed in at 12kg, plus drive shafts and transmission.

The new chassis was lightweight steel, which had been sitting rusting nicely in the basement for months. I'd proved the old mig welder worked when assembling Keeler Carrot, so I dashed out to purchase a cheap angle grinder from Do It All, and the game began.

I don't know about most of you, but to me robot building chiefly involves sitting looking at a pile of bits and realizing I need to spend some more money on something. It's a very stop start business, so I was quite pleased to get the chassis together, grind down the welds, mount the motors, and speedies, and design some chain tensioners all before I decided I should send off a cheque to M&P for some chain and sprockets, and to 4QD for some connectors and stuff.

The armour was to be Lexan and Mark our latest team member and entrepreneurial builder type located some ex council 3mm stock 3metres by 2 for a mere £50.

I had already purchased an air chisel to use as a weapon, but ran up against the old familiar problem of expensive regulators. I determined to use disposable CO2 bottles and get a cheap reg from Northern Equipment. With this the plan was to power a couple of small rams from Graham Leacocks Eng surplus.

And then the holidays ended, back to the grindstone and even more erratic build progress.

At present I am awaiting delivery of gears etc.. But was cheered this morning by the delivery of a Powertrac laser, for targeting/showing off purposes. This was acquired from Adam Clark in exchange for some Christmas card artwork...