Bins wrong size
 

Has anyone noticed at any of the competitions if the bins used differ from any bins you may have measured before ship?

My team got to Annapolis and found the bins 1/2" bigger on certain vital dimensions then they "should" have been. As a stacker, we found this to be quite disturbing.

We adjusted, I'm just wondering if they vary much from regional to regiona- I want to know if we will have to rebuild all our guide's again at Canada.

Greg

interesting...
 

hmmm, i didn't pay that much attention, but just a word of advice, from experience, you should allow for small discrepancies in the dimensions of the field. i could see the potential problem for a half inch difference, but there should be some safety factor in construction for these slight discrepancies. (i.e. the bar may be slightly higher/lower on different fields) i don't see how this error in the boxes could occur, since we were given a specific model number. could there have been an error in measurement or the boxes you ordered?

Perhaps the bins were deformed from use?

Perhaps you got the wrong bins, there were bins that looked very similar to the official ones, and when I went out to look for bins, I found many of the wrong ones. There was a model number and measurements in the manual, so I don't see what could be wrong, what are your measurements you all measured?

Bin Size
 

Some team members from 639 came up to me at Annapolis and asked me if our team had any problems with the bin size. I was able to "borrow" some busted up FIRST bins and compared them to the bins Team 365 brought to test our robot with.

Although the colors were different (we purchased some inventory of a special "green" run which was still in stock after Christmas - what luck!), the models were the same. We compared the two and they were, within expected tolerances, the same. There may have been some dimensional changes due to the fact that they were severely abused by all of us teams.

Apart from that, I would say they were the same bins.

The bins we ordered back here in Ithaca, were much less wide. And yes, the bins we tested were ones we borrowed which were not deformed at the base. The question is why two bins with the same model number would be different at all in size (I'm not talking about 1/4" or less). Anyhoo, I'll go ask FIRST about it sometime.

Perhaps thermal differences are to blame? Certain plastics are known to exhibit expansion and contraction under different temperate circumstances. In the pits or at any given working space, the temperature may be considerably colder than on stage at a competition, under bright lights and constant use.

I have noticed, in working with bins at our workspace, they are much more rigid than the ones I handled at UTC. Again, maybe it's temperature differences? It was much colder at our workspace than it was onstage.

My guess is the company that makes the bins probably modifies the mold so they can get more bins out of it. Damaged mold? No problem, just cut out the damaged part.

But we borrowed a bin from MOE and found it to be 1/4" off.

It is hard to be a stacker and take 1/4" tollerences into consideration when designing.

Greg

Well, that's what you have to do then, you can't expect everything to be perfect, you gotta over-engineer :)

As for the difference in height, you should have remembered to measure the height WITH THE TOP and also, the tops could have been raised up since they were bolted on top.

g_goldman was the bin guy at Annapolis, so I'll see if he can respond to this.