when I was on the Xcats in '02, our bot was designed with a spinning wheel that shot the soccer balls up to 20 feet through the air into the goal.

We had a prototype of it set up on a bench, and we setup a couple PVC pipes as a feeder - we could put 10 soccerballs on the feeder, then let them go, and they would roll down and the spinning wheel would shoot them into the goal at 1/2 second intervals - it was really cool to see.

so we were trying to perfect this shooter, and had rigged a tach to the wheel that we monitored with an oscilloscope. It took two people to hold the tach against the spinning wheel, operate the scope, and load a ball onto the feeder so we could see how much the wheel slowed down as it fired each ball.

one time I was doing this with another engineer, who didnt know how to use the scope. The wheel was spinning, and I was holding the tack against it with one hand, and holding the ball on the feeder back with the other, and the engineer asked me how to trigger the scope?

Push the single button
which one?
the single sweep button
this one?

No [I reach for scope with one hand while leaning over the shooter]... this BAM!

It took me a second to realize I had let the ball go, and shot myself in the face with a soccerball point blank. It took me a few more seconds to figure out if had shot my eye out, and where my glasses were.

no permanate injury, but I have no doubt that robot tried to kill me!

myself and the driver had millions of cuts and scrapes from lifting the robot. At West Michigan I remember looking at my arms on Friday and seeing bloody little cuts all over my arm.

oh..... and every member of the animation team electrocuted themself at some point

Ha ha!
 

No injuries on my team... however, we did injure a few robots due to our wedge and powerful drive trains. Many robots tried to ram ours and... well... they didn't succeed.

Yeah.. that was us.:D

LOL, a good friend of mine grinded his finger. It wasn't that serious, just made him pay attention to what he was doing a little more. Also, i have little scars everywhere from welding. I would get frustrated, along with my welding mentor, and we would both get careless. A burn here, burn there. We would forget which corner we had just welded and would grab it. Good Times. :cool: It was really frustrating then, but now that i look back on it, LOL, we were major losers. :D

recently at the robot rodeo, are chain fell off one of are wheels and i was trying to put a new master link on it. Well all was going good till i was putting the pin on and my hand slipped drving the pin into my thumb so of course i yelled soem choice words and it didnt stop bleeding for awhile and i decided to get stitches when i got home (that was about 4 hours latta) waiting that long and not getting it cleaned enough caused the finger to get infected which in the cut they put 2 stiches so i had to go back to the hospital and they made another cut to drain the puss out of my finger :rolleyes: word of the wise if it looks like it needs stiches, go get them

one thing Ive learned over the years, whenever you work on something mechanical

you are not 'done' until you have smeared some blood on it.

for example, if you are working on your car, and you dont bash a knuckle or cut yourself, dont put the tools away when you think you are done, cause the car wont be right

and when you do cut yourself, make sure you get some blood on the machine, or it wont count, and you will have to do it all over later. :v)

yes
 

Yes we have had our cuts and scrapes here and their thankfully no serious injuries!

If anything has serious injuries it would have to be our robot.
Did you know you can dent lexan?
Did you know you can puncture lexan?
Did you know you can paint lexan by scrubing up with MOE?

Did you know our robot was dropped by a shipping company?
This drop would have to be the most damaging thing that our 2003 bot has seen. This bent our frame and broke a whole bunch of stuff including the operater interface controls.

I guess you can say our robot has almost been through Battle Bots. This is due to being in 4 FIRST competitions and 5 off-season events and it will be seeing its 6th off-season event this Saturday.

This will probably its retirement party....

Um... well I was almost beat up by the students for breaking the drill motor as soon as we got it this year?? Does that count??

It fell apart right in my hands.... I swear!!!

There were little gears all over the place!!

handle with care
 

Last year our robot bite me almost every time i worked on it. But the worst injury came when we were test auton mode we didn't quite have the code right and it took a bite out of the ramp! It took out a robot size chuck, but what does one expect when working with a hammerhead!

( I think it also gave someone a rug burn while pulling them across the carpet ):D

There was one really comical one for 159 that TatSak missed...

We were having a Colorado exhibition to promote new teams in order to get a regional for this year (success!). Anyways, we were having a little trouble with our drive code for some reason. Well, good ol' TatSak pushed the joystick, it accelerated perfectly with the stick, and failed to stop when he released the joystick. Well, at our somewhat rudimentary field, there were no barriers on the edge of the field. What we did have on the edge of the field was a cameraman from FOX NEWS! Well, I, with my most unpracticed football skills, gallantly tackled the beast and got the power switch, but not before suffering numerous gashes on my shins and fingers. One on my shin bled quite profusely, causing me to have to change socks...

thats one advantage to having a two wheel drive powertrain

if the bot goes out of control, you can simply lift the drivewheels off the ground :^)

Well, at the beginning of the season, we were role playing with people as robots. We wanted to see if throwing boxes would do anything for us. Problem is, we did not have the official boxes yet, so we used hard plastic crates...VERY hard! Well, the kid across the field from me threw it up and I heard PAUL LOOK OUT! I looked up and BAM! Right in the face. It hit at the bridge of my nose, but I didn't break anything.

The big one happened at the Cleveland Regional. Out arms have chain and sprockets to open them, and they open in Autonomous mode. Well, a girl had her hands in there and the Auto mode got switched on. It sucked her finger in between the chain and the sprocket. (Anyone there probably heard her scream) Thank goodness it was still loose, because if it were tightened, it would have taken her finger right off.

Re: yes
 

I like to think of it as us "leaving our mark" on FIRST. If they can see after being blinded by all the lime-green that is.

As for injuries, I haven't had any serious ones.... yet...

-Nationals 2002- I was doing an "infamous" fasteners check on one of MOEHawks wings when the long mailing tube (8' or something close to) which was full of extra aluminum to repair the wings fell over and hit me right between my shoulder blades. It sure stunned me... and left quite the bruise too. Advil became my best friend for the rest of the competition.

-2003 Commonwealth Awards- Both MOE and the Lunatechs were lucky to be invited to this event at the Hotel Dupont, where Dean was recieving his award and doing press confrences. We had a need for some Duct Tape to hang something... so i dug out my roll (I AM known as Ducky for a reason) but realized that i had grabbed the roll which is impossible to rip by hand. No problem... I always have my multi-tool too... so I pulled it out, cut a few pieces. I was closing the blade, when someone bumped into me. The very sharp blade on my multi-tool closed; but caught about 2.5-3 inches of my wrist while doing so. I just barely kept back the naughty words as I made for the snack table to get some napkins or something. of course being the Hotel Dupont, they only had cloth napkins. I felt so bad bleeding all over two of them. Luckly my blood clots quickly, so I didn't need to get stiches, but I used quite a few bandaids to try and cover it till it healed enough that it stopped opening at random times.

Aside from that it has just been random cuts and scrapes from building or close encounters with the file cards. I am much worse with "non-dangerous" substances like Dykem and Anti-seize.

Re: the list
 

No, no, its all wrong.

This is what GWB was thinking:

" "


And that is all he ever thinks.

Re: yes
 

I believe my friend Brad here is mistaken.
as some of you know we hve gum-rubber wheels, which are not the easiest to cut as our alumni Cliff found out. It involed a:
-drill press- $1,000(?)
-hole saw- $100
-1' gum-rubber- $80
-!Hey, look out! - free
-and one really priceless bruise on Cliff's stomach