Two teams on target (From Gazette Series)

Two teams on target

TWO teams from Wotton-under-Edge have competed in BBC Bristol's Geronimo event in Weston-Super-Mare.

The competition was hosted by Dick Strawbridge, winner of Scrapheap Challenge and presenter of Crafty Tricks of War, and Fearne Cotton' who presents ''Top of the Pops and CBBC.

One of the teams was Beagle 3 with the Alliston family consisting of Alex, Caroline, Neil and little Simon, from Water Lane, who entered the Olympic Triple Jump.

This event consisted of a long jump, a high jump and a triple jump, followed by a triple jump over a wall and 'shark-infested' paddling pool for the two finalists.

Beagle 3 was a simple creation using the solid fuel rocket won earlier this year by the team in the BBC family robot competition - "when we annihilated the opposition and took out the house robots to boot!" said Caroline.

The rocket was used to launch the 'top secret weapon' - a high-tech triple-jumping probe, otherwise known as a bouncy ball.

The other team was Caroline's team from Renishaw Plc who entered Sir David in the Ultimate Penalty Shoot-out - with distance and accuracy events, shooting into an open goal andthen, in the final, shooting against a live goalkeeper.

The Sir David machine consisted of two bench grinders mounted on a frame made out of rusty shelving units, eight-inch pulleys and flat belts running at 70 mph.

A small pendulum was used to knock the ball in between the rotating belts and the bench grinders were driven by a portable petrol generator.

Beagle 3 was relegated to third place after a Royal Academy of Engineers expert claimed that the bouncy ball had failed to bounce.

A disgruntled member of the Alliston team said: "This was after the ball dropped 80 metres out of the sky! What about the laws of physics?. We could see the bounces from 50 metres away on the start line."

The opposition for the event turned out to be quite intimidating.

It included a 26-foot spring loaded pendulum by Dick Strawbridge's own team and Cod Almighty by the team which h makes the Wallace and Gromit sets - half a motorcycle driving two full size wheels at 120 mph, the same concept as Sir David, but with 200 times the power.

Despite this, in the first event, Sir David did much better than expected and finished fourth.

Caroline said: "Then there was a bit of a hiccup in the accuracy event.

"After we had confidently told the cameras thatif the ball went in straight it would come out straight, it insisted on 'bending it like Beckham' to the right and completely missing the target."

The Renishaw team just scraped through into the semi-final, in fifth place.

and finished a respectable joint third.

Cod Almighty went through to the final against an ingenious machine, Wyvern Revolution, from Wyvern Community School. This takes place on BBC 2 in the second week of January.