Finagler

At the same time that I was building Arvid, my teacher put me into touch with two other guys at my school who were interested in building a "robot" to compete in Robot Wars. Back then, fighting robots were in their infancy and because of that, we put together a robot that we thought might be competitive on a shoestring budget. At that event, the robots were driven inside of a ring of 4-foot high plywood with no bulletproof glass at all. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who later went on to work on Mythbusters were there with a robot called Blendo but weren't allowed to compete because their robot was considered too dangerous. Mark Setrakian from Robot Combat League was also there with a 12-foot long snake robot that although it wasn't competitive, looked REALLY cool. I created Finagler's electronics by modifying a remote control toy to work with motors that were about 300 times as powerful as its original motors. We were able to compete but weren't very successful because the toy electronics didn't have a lot of range so we inadvertently drove out of radio reception in our first match.

You can find more information about Finagler at: http://www.buffingtonfx.com/j1432/proj/robotwars/battlebots.html