Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

You really need to be more safe.

1.) I'm sorry, but you have to be stupid to solder without safety goggles. My good friend was soldering, and to save time, he didn't put his safety glasses on over his eyes. An impurity in the piece he was working on came to a boil, and splashed right into his eyeball. He is now blind in that eye. Before you go to solder, think to yourself, "is my eyesight worth the inconvenience of wearing safety glasses?"

2.) If you're drilling through foam or plywood, then it's ok. If you're drilling through aluminum, and the bit catches on the part, it'll spin and cut you. If you're unlucky, it'll break your wrist. I've seen it happen.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

+1 to this. One of the captains of my former team almost lost two of her fingers when she was drilling a hole in a piece of wood and the bit caught. If it's possible for it to go wrong, it usually will, and always at the most inopportune time.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

We did the same thing last year.

218b: ^^^and hand feed the frisbees. The conveyor belting spun around and fractured my finger.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Wire while the robot is on.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Really, really, REALLY.

"I do X that I know is in violation of basic and fundamental shop safety rules" would get you banned from my team in a heartbeat, while you still had one.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

We had a 4 sided intake in 2012. Made for an awesome undercarriage picture. Didn't turn out particularly useful though...

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Fry a jaguar from wiring it reverse polarity.
Except no we did it twice.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Try to balance on a bridge while dragging your battery across the floor behind you.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

227 (i think that's what number we're on): Build a top heavy robot that moves very quickly
228: Allow the vast majority of your team to go home before testing the newly wired drive train.
We were supposed to be finished this past Saturday around 4:30, but something went wrong with our victors and it was 7 ish before we (myself, our programmer, our coach, and two mentors) actually went home. If we had more people there, maybe we would have figured out the issue much faster.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Definitely don't drill anything metal, sharp, or both while holding it with your hand. Fortunately the scar is pretty much gone now.

Other things to avoid:

• Cutting small parts on the chopsaw (it will go flying)

• Leaving the chuck key in a drill press/lathe/mill

• Holding resistors while soldering them

• Stalling AM9015 motors (burned out the motor and melted the brand new Anderson connectors)

• Send poorly dimensioned drawings for machining

I should point out that CAD autosave is not a thing because of the time it takes to save assemblies of hundreds of parts.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

This is a good way to get a chuck key lodged in your skull. No joking matter, this could legitimately kill you.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

The Torbots found a way to deal with this on the drill presses, or 2/3 of them at any rate. First, the chuck key is chained to the stand of the drill press... then the "On" button is covered in such a way that the chuck key has to be used to turn on the drill press. The "Off" button? WIDE open in case of needing to hit it quickly.

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

Accidentally overwrite someone else's changes when working in a CAD assembly

Forget to dimension the locations of holes in a CAD drawing

Use the extrude command to create a hole on Autodesk Inventor

Re: Things you only do ONCE!
 

I know someone tried to wire a controller into the PDB with the battery connected and a circuit breaker in the slot.

Put a 1/4 20 but on the PD board.