2014's showing was essentially damage-free. In 2015, LIWhoCon moved to a new hotel which had some challenges. Of note:

Trips on and off the elevators didn't help. That's the cause of the lost rollers on the base. I don't have a good solution for this at the moment; I'm just going to take more spares.

The wire antenna on the Wii controller broke off. It takes a lot of abuse.

The gun stalk took some good hits - some because of spinning the head around in to things, and some from people just accidentally hitting it. This nicked the paint job on the gun stalk, and cracked the collar pretty badly.

The gun repainting was simple; some light sanding, re-priming, re-painting, re-clear coat-ing. And after 2015, it chipped again; I'll have to repaint it again this year.

The collar, I punted on. Much of that damage is hidden behind the gun box. I pushed it all back in to alignment and superglued it. Good enough for now.

But the best damage of all was due to the long stretches of hallway - particularly in 2015. (Bear with the long version.)

The motors weren't quite matched, and the dalek drifted a bit. Jake found this hard to compensate for, so I pulled apart all of the gearboxes for all of the motors I had to try to best re-match them.

I rebuilt the two with gears that matched a little better, and I'm sure all of this stressed the heck out of the components. Remember that the top speed of this thing is under 2 MPH; less than walking speed. I may have built a slightly lower gear ratio so that the Dalek would travel a little faster; I don't actually remember. I know that was one of my goals, and I remember testing it. I just don't recall where I left it.

So when we were trundling down the long hallways in 2015, we impatiently pushed Bob along a little bit. Which definitely stressed the gears. Which lead to this terrible picture:

Do you see it? No?

There it is - one missing tooth. Crap.

Fortunately, I'd brought other motors with; I swapped back the 100:1 ratio that I'd used the year before, and we made it through the event. Slowly.

That, along with the list of the bits of the build that never got implemented in the first place, give me a good list of items to think about:

• Replace the motors with something faster and more reliable;
• Re-paint the gun stalk;
• Re-cast the collar;
• Live voice modulation, instead of pre-recorded pieces;
• Louder amplification (it's hard to hear in a noisy conference);
• Cleaned-up electronics (with better safeties);
• Painted-on black collar (the current one is a printed cut-out);
• Airway for sound to exit from the head;
• Replace the antenna (wire) that broke off of the Wii controller.

And probably a half dozen things I haven't thought about yet. :)

I'm sure I'm not going to get all that done for 2016.