K*bot World Championships
During a roller-coaster building session one afternoon, two of his students made simple motorised machines from K'Nex parts and placed them opposite each other on the floor, determining that they must try to push each other back to win their match.
A group of students, including K*bots UK founding members Toby Wheeler, David Weston and Chris Bowdon, organised the first collective event in April 2002 in Carterton, near Oxford.
The first World Championships were held in July 2002 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the Veterans Memorial Leisure Services Centre, which has become their permanent home ever since.
Considerable expense went into trophies and prizes for the winning students and it started to attract interest from regional television and press media.
[5] With enthusiasm for K*bots gathering pace and returning students becoming ever more inventive, the 2005 World Championships saw the emergence of some very advanced models which started, for the first time, to push the limits of what the K'Nex motors were capable of.
Competition regulations Division M K*bots are manually operated models which compete in a tabletop arena enclosed within plexiglas walls approximately 7.5 cm (3.0 in) tall.
Division M1 was for lightweight K*bots weighing a maximum of 75 g (0.165 lb), designed to encourage students to build at home if they did not own a lot of K'Nex.
These split categories survived until early 2004, but with the growth of more structured K*bots events in Britain, they became obsolete when the standard World Championships weight limit was adopted.
Prior examples include wind-powered sail cars, pull-back dragsters, tennis ball launchers and motorised walking racers.
Under guidance from the instructors, first-time students learn basic concepts of physics and mechanical engineering, specific to building an effective moving model out of K'Nex.
Participation at a Regional event is not mandatory for students wishing to take part in the World Championships, but it is highly recommended for a number of reasons.
Most importantly, first-time builders receive only limited instruction time at the World Championships, whereas provision is much greater at Regional events.
These vary from simple chassis protrusions, designed to snag and dig into the tabletop surface, to more advanced strategies such as slip-gears and backward-mounted friction motors on axles to prevent them from turning backward.
Due to increasing stresses being placed upon K*bots, all varieties of brakes were outlawed from 2006 onwards in an attempt to protect the K'Nex motors from damage.
Division 2 K*bots therefore evolved to have a drive train comprising a series of meshed gears, linking the front and rear wheel axles.
Taking gearing strategies to the extent of its logical progression, in 2008 David Small, from Phoenix, Arizona, created the first (and to date, the only) K*bot with a variable transmission system.
This allowed the K*bot to reach the centre-line of the competition table before its opponent, and then engage high-torque mode to prevent it from being pushed backward at too great a rate.
Outlawed However, an objection was raised in August 2008 on the grounds that the introduction of such a complex system into the field would result in such dramatic potential changes to the Division 2 build philosophy that it would prevent many students from producing successful K*bots.
The pioneer of this technique was Edy Valdes from Texas, who installed an active chassis on his K*bot Greem Reaper to win two World Championships in Division 1, in 2002 and 2005.
Active chassis, more commonly termed flexi-fronts, are non-rigid constructions designed to arch up on contact with an opposing pushing force, creating elastic potential energy, and channelling the resulting pressure into the K*bot's rear wheels.
Moving into the field of Division M; there are two key types of weapon – flippers and hammers – and both have been subject to significant upgrades since their initial inception.
A flipper built with multiple sets of pivots, however, is designed to multiply the force used and distance travelled by the input lever, which results in a significantly more powerful output from the weapon shaft.
These flippers are designed to be capable of throwing a 650g K*bot several feet across the competition table, and possibly even clearing the arena walls to win by knockout.
As if in response to the rising dominance of the flippers, Turret Hammers made a brief appearance at the 2005 World Championships, before positively exploding in number in 2007.
In 2005, the popular Oliver Serrao, a K*bots student and Division 3 World Champion, tragically lost his life along with his parents in a fire at their home in Texas.
These categories are: Every year, a popular feature of the Ollie Awards ceremony is the Pro Challenge, in which the World Championships instructors all build their own K*bots to compete against each other for a special prize.
Greem Reaper cruised to the 2002 Division 1 World Championship, but was narrowly defeated in 2003 and was then eliminated in the opening round in 2004, to the surprise of everyone involved in the competition.
This prompted some upgrades by builder Edy Valdes, and Greem Reaper then returned to win the 2005 World Championship, before retiring the following year.
In its four years of competition, Man Eater achieved the incredible feat of winning three successive K*bot World Championships, dominating the division from 2005 to 2007.
During this time, it also achieved notoriety in Britain as the nemesis of Crosshair, denying Andrew Martin the title on two successive occasions by knocking him out of the competition.
