Recycling parts
 

If our team was to go to a scrap yard or someplace similar and recycle parts from machines that would either wise be scrapped. How do we write that on the bill of materials?

Re: Recycling parts
 

People have their opinions, but the right way to do it is fair market value.

Re: Recycling parts
 

Per R11, you need to find the fair market value of all non-KOP robot items.

Example: If you source some aluminum from a junkyard, the cost of an equivalent amount of aluminum from McMaster-Carr would be an acceptable fair market value.

There are multiple ways to determine multiple fair-market values for one item. As long as the fair-market value you determine is less than $400 and your robot doesn't cost more than $4000 total, there's no need to find the best value.

Re: Recycling parts
 

R11 says you have to determine the fair-market value.

Re: Recycling parts
 

So what exactly is fair market value? Is it:

• Wholesale Price?
• Retail Price?
• Raw material Price?
• Craigslist Price?
• "I'll sell this to your team for $1 because we already wrote this off of our books and it has no residual financial value since its been sitting on this shelf idle for 10 years?"

Honestly, there is quite a bit of wiggle room on the BOM value. You can pro-rate the cost based off of what you actually use, not the bulk shipment and scrap.

Re: Recycling parts
 

I've always treated "fair market value" as meaning the price any random FRC team would be able to purchase something for.

Re: Recycling parts
 

I asked this same question in Q&A two years ago... If you take a used part, you still have to list the "cost" as the retail price for a new item. The reasoning: Otherwise teams that had been around for a few years could get all sorts of "free" parts for their robot and, effectively, could "spend" several times as much on their robots as newer teams. You have to do the same thing if items are donated.

Re: Recycling parts
 

That's how I've always treated the valuation of parts for FRC, also.

Re: Recycling parts
 

If I buy parts from a junkyard (say, a shaft coupler; which I did, two years ago) and pay what a junkyard sells the part for, isn't it safe to presume that the other junkyards I might have visited would sell me the same part for something like the same price?

Re: Recycling parts
 

Can you, with some degree of confidence, guarantee that any team could go to a junkyard and find that same part for the same price? Or can they order that part from the place you got it from? If not, then you would need to list the price that it can be commonly found at.

After years of doing this, I still don't get how teams can spend $4k on a robot... Well, I guess I could if we had $4k extra laying around.