"...And then there was Blendo.

     No robot then or now has captured the imagination of the audience more than Blendo. Although it has not appeared in public since 1997, a curious mistique surrounds it to this day. Not only was it exciting to watch, and undefeated, but Robot Wars deemed Blendo so dangerous that it was ultimately banned from competition.

     Blendo design was deceptively simple; Two $30 Chinese cooking woks were bolted to a steel plate. Underneath the dome shape, a five-horsepower Briggs & Stratton Lawnmower engine spun a flywhell at 70 miles per hour.

      Two sharp blades were bolted to the flywheel, and protuded several inches from under the dome. A Paper loader mechanism, borrowed from a Xerox machine functioned as the drive system.

     The result was a 170 webber grill from Satan's own backyard. Nobody stood a chance. Blendo just didn't just defeat opponents, its centrifugal force literally tore them to shreds, dramatically flinging pieces into the air with a loud whack. Most matches were over within seconds, the audience screaming and stamping its feet, as the opposigng driver quiety picked up stray wheels and metal shards from the arena.

     People would sworm the Team Blendo arena. Measuring the robot, taking photographs, drawing schematics, trying to figure out its design weaknesses, if any, and how to modify their own armor to defend against it.

     Visitor to the internet robot forums posted endless theories on how to take Blendo down. Robot Wars modified its official rules to reflect Blendo's revolutionary rotary-inertia design.

     Playing off their notoriety, designer Jamie Hyneman and other Team Blendo members, would show up at events wearing cammo fatigues, and refuse to speak to other roboteers.

     Hyneman would find out who his next opponent was, then sit nearby, staring him down while honing the tips of Blendo's blades.

     "They'd get all worked up," he laughs."The pit area got quiet, and people turned pale. We like that kind of thing. This is all just great fun."

     Hyneman says he spent only $600 to contruct Blendo, most of which paid for the radio electronics. Since going into semi-retirement, Hyneman has had time to think about his brief tenure year as a Robot Wars superstar.

     "All of the geeks who were never on the football team but made straight A's in science - this is their chance to be Bullies," says Hyneman, who builds models for M5 Industries in San Francisco. "There's a huge ammount of emmotion involved. unlike the high-school footbal game, there's a lot of thought, very high-quality thought, that goes into this stuff.

    You're competing against something that you have no idea what you are going to go against."