Drizzle 2018
Drizzle is a very powerful two wheeled vertical spinner with one of the biggest Beetleweight weapons in existence. There have been several different versions of Drizzle - originally he used a smaller version of Monsoon's bar as seen here, but more recently has used several different designs of disc.
Tom originally designed Drizzle to take part in the first series of Bugglebots, filmed in September 2018. Bugglebots is a beetleweight robot fighting web series featuring 30 teams from around the world. The show was created entirely by volunteers as a response to the BBC cancelling Robot Wars and you can watch the whole 2018 season at Bugglebots.com or on YouTube - Drizzle is in heat 1 and reached the heat final. Later in the series Drizzle also competed in the UK v The World special.
Bugglebots was Drizzle's first competition and it's fair to say he created quite an impression! In October 2018 he competed in the FRA European Championships and reached the quarter finals. By now Drizzle was getting a real reputation for being pretty destructive and also for getting serious airtime!
Drizzle 2019
In April 2019 Drizzle had his biggest starring role to date. He was on Monsoon's pit table for the whole of Battlebots filming (alongside TTRE, Tom's antweight robot) and made several appearances on camera. He even made it into the Battlebots arena before Monsoon's fight against Valkyrie - he appeared sitting on top of Monsoon and even pressed the blue button for the start of the fight! He then went on a road trip with the team, and visited Death Valley and the Grand Canyon.
Not long after coming back from the USA he went on to compete with the disc configuration in Season 2 of Bugglebots, which was filmed in May 2019. Drizzle's matches were always fun to watch - our bouncy blue boi appeared in heat 5.
Drizzle Mk2
For the FRA Beetleweight Champs at Marlow in October 2019 Drizzle was completely redesigned. Drizzle 2 now features:
- Redesigned chassis
- Reversible weapon to aid with self righting
- 4mm, 300g Hardox 500 disc (up from 3mm)
- Alternate 6mm, 400g Hardox 500 disc (for those pesky wedges)
- Bent wraparound Gr5 Titanium wedge (including a setup for horizontals)
- Lower angle wedge
- All new Titanium Ass™ technology
Drizzle Mk3
Then came Battle in the 'Burgh, a Beetleweight tournament held in Edinburgh. This was Drizzle's most successful competition to date. Despite facing some really strong opponents and needing major work several times, Tom got Drizzle back into the arena for fight after fight, and finished in fourth place. Drizzle also won an award for the furthest distance travelled whilst in the air!
Drizzle Mk4
The next redesign of Drizzle came towards the end of 2021, in preparation for the Bristol Bot Builders (BBB) Beetleweight Championship.
Meet Drizzle Mk.4!
This is the standard configuration, now with a 6mm Harxox 500 disc (up from 4mm!) This is also the heaviest disc we've ever run at 380g.
Here are some of the other changes:
- Weapon has moved forwards to aid with stability
- Moved from a timing belt to a tight O ring belt on the weapon pulley. This allows for better self righting!
- Weapon pulley is custom made with larger shoulders, should stop it/the belt coming off!
- Weapon motor shaft is now fully supported by bearings
- Wheelie bars have moved outward towards the wheels to aid with stability
- Weapon shaft now bolts the bulkheads together to increase chassis rigidity
- Chassis is lighter all round to allow for more configurations
Drizzle has a choice of weapons he can use depending on the opponent - a 6mm bar, 3mm disc, and a 6mm big bite anti-horizontal disc. The latter was 4mm previously but was a little bent after facing so many horizontals!
BBB Championships 06 November 2021
There's a detailed writeup of all Drizzle's fights at the beetleweight champs on our Facebook page.