Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

Our team has always had a limit of 2 robots and our tools due to lack of storage space. Currently our storage space consists of one ~12ft.X12ft. closet. I would like to keep more robots together (we disassemble them after 2 years), and am also interested in getting large permanent tools (such as a lathe, drill press, or if money is lucky a milling machine) since all those we have are currently brought over by mentors in trucks and have to be taken home every day.

I am wondering how many robots teams actually keep around (maybe there's no good reason for more than 2), and what storage space your team has (if you have more than one storage area, check all you have please). If you know how your team got that space, that information would be greatly appreciated as I want to get more space for our team next year, either somewhere else in the school or off campus.

All the previous threads I've seen on this topic are at least a year old, and none really mention how teams obtained the space they have. They also aren't any polls on this subject and I would like some numbers.

Thank you for any help you can give!

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

We don't have much room, our robots usually get canibalized the next year, with the only exception being our 2004 #1 seed and regional winner. That and the empty frame of last year's robot are sitting in a hallway. We'll be taking the rest of last year's robot apart after this season.

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All of 111's are at their playing field/workshop except for their 98 robot which is at First HQ.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

we have 3 robots (4 when the new one gets back) and we keep them in the closet that the school considers to be the robotics room

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We have 14 of our 15 robots in our museam (we don't have our original robot. That's in FIRST Place and I doubt they'll give it back)

You can see robots in the background from 95,97, 98 and 2000 in the background.

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We kept our old robots and our crate parts in an abandoned girls bathroom (sinks, stalls, etc, removed) next to the autoshop. It was pretty funny when you had a bunch of guys who needed parts saying "We're going to the girls bathroom now". :p

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We have all our robots from Occam 2 (2002)-Occam VI (2006) in our shop. Our rookie 'bot, Occam 1 got disassembled for its 80/20 and square extrusion this year.

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All of our robots are stored in the closet the team uses. Bob has been stripped to the frame, which currently hangs from the ceiling. Ockham is mostly together, and Circumstance is in there as well. Once Chomp gets back to the school, we'll have to do a little shuffle to get it all in--but we'll get it.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

I believe that we have 5 robots in working order that have not been disassembled. Our first year robot was cannibalized and dissassembled to create space in our shop and make an electronics board. A few of our robots are enshrined at the headquarters of our founding sponsor, Quest Technologies, with some of our regional trophies. Our other robots are sitting in the school shop, awaiting repairs, refurbishments, and/or paint jobs (since we have switched to steel as our frame of choice).

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It sounds like most teams have their bots around, but they just sit there and look good (which wouldn't be a bad thing). Does anyone use previous years robots still, for demonstrations or for practice for the upcoming year?

How did you guys get enough space to store all the previous robots? Is your team just big enough that there's a gigantic room for robotics, or did you go ask a sponsor or someone for space? The big thing I'm trying to figure out is where to get more space since I think there is very little chance we'll get any more at our school (considering we actually lost space since the golf and soccer stuff moved into our closet and hasn't been moved to the new gym despite our repeated efforts).

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Doesn't it figure that the year after you disassemble four of your previous robots that you finally get enough storage space to store upwards of ten old robots? Last year we had to disassemble our 2000-2003 robots to save space, and our 2004 robot is practically disassembled. We weren't really going to disassemble our 2004 bot until we took it to a parade and it rained. 'Nuff said. :(

This year we moved to a different high school in our town and we now have a ton of long term storage space. At least we kept all the major mechanisms from our older robots in one piece, as a kind of museum to our robots of yesteryear.

Our 2005 robot is in one piece, but not in a runnable condition. It seems as if a lot of parts broke on it during / right after Bash at the Beach. A bit of machining will be needed to make new parts. We have long term plans to try to restore it as a project in the fall of 2006. (This is also my favorite robot from our team, so I hope we don't disassemble it. ;))

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We've got five robots stored throughout our school (tomorrow it'll be six - this years robot arrived today). Some are in our small robotics room, the smaller (and earlier) ones are in a display case next to our school's office, and the others are in our advisor's class room. All but two are immobile, I believe :p

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

We have room for 1 robot and all of our tools.

Our school is very reluctant to lend us any storage space and refuse to allow us to build a shed on the school grounds like the baseball team did.

We borrow about half of a storage closet from the librarians. We have a problem due to the fact that we keep getting more equipment each year from FIRST. This is our second year and already our half of the closet is crammed full and is almost dangerous to walk in (stuff poorly stacked on overhead shelves and whatnot).

If we don't have a shed in the next couple years then I think we're going to have to have mentors and robotics students store unneeded stuff at their house.

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We have our year 1, 3, 4, and 5 robots currently functional and stored @ our school. Our year 2 robot was somewhat cannibalized for parts, and never got put back together. Being that some robots are better "demonstration 'bots" than others, we keep certain robots (#3, #4, and this year #5 as well) in fully-operational condition throughout the year to do press releases and local demos. The other 'bots sit in a storage room above our machine shop and collect dust :(

As for supplies and parts...let's just say they're EVERYWHERE ;)

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Don't overestimate the damage due to water. Last year we had a pipe break in our Robotics room over a weekend. All the doors and windows were closed so the result was basically a rainstorm inside the class room, which included the 2004 robot, 20 computers, and all our tools and supplies. After the initial heart attack upon seeing the damage we let everything dry out for a week or so. Everything ended up covered in rust, but everything ran fine. As long as the elecronics aren't running when they are wet things should be fine.

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We have a bunch of our robots dating back to 2001, if I recall... They usually end up in people's garages or stored in the school when our warehouse is not available (offseason)

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We use most of our old robots as prototyping platforms and driver training. We also take the working ones out for demonstrations (especially in the spring when this year's robot is shipped). When the robots get to the point where they use components that are no longer relevant to this year's challange they get stored :( .

One notable exception is our 1999 National Championship robot which is mostly untouched in its niche in the shop.

Two of our less reliable robots were dismantled the next year.

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:D We usually keep "older" robots in the basement that we work in. Not only do these robots give us inspiration, but they also give us parts when we run out! :D

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I'm not as close to 522 as I used to be due to my work schedule but from their first robot to the current one are kept in a nice size room that way they can do some public relations tasks and get some excersize. The Girls; as they are still considered are well maintained and get their monthly maintenance. Well except their 2003 robot, she was canabalized so that the 2004 robot can have a somewhat similar mentality :] ;)

I try to prevent the coaches from taking apart the girls only b/c each one has its story and if you take them apart no one will be around to tell the story.:ahh:

As for spare parts theres no such thing as "SPARE", however there are such things as a prototype & "TEMPORARY" parts :ahh:

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Our school facility is housed in a technical wing of the high school, and some of our space used to be a "house" for electrical students to wire. The first floor is our tool storage area and the upper area is for more long term storage. Until last year, we had a "graveyard" of robots up in storage. We decided last year to dismantle most of them for parts and extra space, so basically we now have this year's and last year's robots complete, with two more stripped-down frames used as prototyping platforms/driver practice/hassle bots/programming/etc. We had thoughts of hanging the old robots from the ceiling or displaying them as some type of "museum" of history, but that concept never got past the idea stage. In the "old" days, you had to return your control system at the end of the year, and keeping machines wasn't as useful...now that you get to keep the controls every year, it seems more reasonable to keep machines functioning if you have the space.

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We keep all of our robots, back at least as long as I've been on the team, which was 2000. I think we even have the '99 robot somewhere out at the shop but it isn't operational anymore. They usually stay in working condition since we tend to use them for demos and such. Some of them have parts added post-season too, to use them for testing the next year's game (like adding a tetra manipulator to the bar hanging robot to give drivers some practice until we could finish that year's bot).

We now store them in the classroom at school (it is a great thing to see 6 or 7 robots lining the back wall of a classroom, and knowing how every one of them did amazing in competition). Perhaps we'll have to move them in a couple of years since we won't be able to fit them all in there. I personally think disassembling a robot is a bad idea, because they have a lot of memories that go with them. Like I said, as a mentor who was once on the team, it is great to go back and see all the robots I helped with and remember the good times I had with them. Keep them somewhere, even if you have to put them in your own garage or something.

Maybe one day we can have champion robots be in a hall of fame or something so they can be preserved for generations to come. That would be awesome!

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Eric (2005) and Stealth Hedgehog (2003) are at the back of the Electronics Lab, Conicio (just back from NYC) is... somewhere. Possibly the Green shed where we keep the FLL stuff, our crate and a load of other stuff, including the caretakers lawnmower...

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

This is one thing that has somewhat bothered me about having to kill previous robots all the time; you can explain to the club how "back in such and such a year, this worked out well", but even with the few pictures we have of them new members just can't get a sense of how the robot truly worked. Of course there were some robots we were more than happy to destroy (namely the 2003 one). Storage will always be a problem for us I think though, so I'm pretty sure we'll have to continue this way.

For teams that have robots from before 2004, how effective are the RC and OI on them for testing with the kind of things we do now? We have 3 sets of controls from those years sitting around that could be used to build a robot, but no remaining member (and maybe 1 mentor) has experience programming them, and I'm not quite sure if they'd be worth the hassle to learn so that we could use them.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

an unused bathroom, however sometimes the axel get rusty

limit of about 2 full size

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We keep a lot of old field elements, some driver stations we made, various robot parts, and some other things related to robotics in a shipping container next to our fuel cell, similar to:

Some robots are stored in a little closet on the exterior of our school, and then we also have another closet behind our machine shop / computer lab / classroom where we keep the rest of the robots we still have, not all of which operate, but are still pretty assembled. I think we have pretty much all of them, though I'm sure some of the earlier ones are no longer there. The only robot to really see cannibalization was our 2004 robot, which remains our test robot for this year, and has been very modified in the last two years. These three areas are reffered to as super super secret store, super secret store, and secret storage.

The school used to give us a whole abandoned classroom to keep things, but due to expansion, they just gave us the shipping container.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

How big is the spaces at the rent a storage - they're pretty cheap and if the space is high and wide enough you may be able to get a couple of storage spaces in a storage building for dirt cheap all though I do like the empty container idea the down side to that is not every school has the property to keep one of those handy. Any other Storage Solutions ?

The Controllers are every bit as the same accept the added feature of the LEDs and of course software upgrades & Programming Language. That in reality is only thing that seperates the controllers from 1999 - 2003 and 2004 - Current.

From 1999 - 2003 I think the programming language was PBasic
And From 2004 to the Future the programming language is C++ which is alot more powerful and you can do alot more in the program (Autonomous and other extras)

Personally with what we do now you probably will not be able to get done a whole lot. You can go ahead and build a robot but to practice programming it you would need a complete controller setup from 2004 onwards. Theres no point hooking something up that understands PBasic and then transfering it to a newer setup then only understands C++. I don't like to be negative but thats how it is - believe it or not these controllers take a beating and ceases to amaze me how they are still able to work.

Heres a question: Of all the teams that have their robots in one piece, Does everything 100% work as if it were day 1 all over again or are some of the robots a big "rusty" - And do you still have a 100% complete OI Setup for each of the working robots?

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

Is it sad that at one point we actually had the past 4 years OIs in our closet, although only 2 of those robots still existed? We always build a brand new OI every single year, with the exception of moving a few joysticks (which we can just unplug and put back on previous years if need be). Our robots tend to gradually fall apart; most things stay fine but our pneumatics have a tendancy to fail very quickly after competition (we never tripped a breaker when we actually competed, then the same robot has blown more than 3 just from demos).

I know that the chips were in PBasic, I wasn't sure how the storage space or the processor speed compared to the current ones since when I joined and started programming it was the first year they had the C robot controllers. From what I've heard programming would be a pain (I don't like not having else statements). It sounds like the old controllers would be okay for building something for remote control (a demo/test bot), but would be worthless in sensor prototyping or autonomous testing.

One thing I'm worried about out here that most teams probably don't have to deal with for outside storage is the heat. Outside storage conatiners would get HOT in the summer here (as I'm sure you know we get air temperatures above 110 regularly), plus I don't think our school could find room for it on campus. Is cooled storage easy to find, or is heat something I probably don't need to worry about?

Thank you everyone for all your replies. After this poll, I'm much more confident I'll be able to find more storage space somewhere.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

2004+ controllers use PIC C. It's close enough to ANSI C, so if you know that you'll be set.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

[quote=Donut]
One thing I'm worried about out here that most teams probably don't have to deal with for outside storage is the heat. Outside storage conatiners would get HOT in the summer here (as I'm sure you know we get air temperatures above 110 regularly), plus I don't think our school could find room for it on campus. Is cooled storage easy to find, or is heat something I probably don't need to worry about?

[quote]


See out here in NYC we have many different Storage Buildings that are in house and climate controlled the only problem is that I never actually been in one before so I don't know the height depth and width of a storage closet. The good thing about them is they are dirt cheap close 10 - 30 bucks monthly (well at least out over here they're dirt cheap). If you have like a storage Deluxe Building or another company out there you should be able to go look at the area before purchasing it and see if its big enough to house a couply of robots w/ their control decks or a small container with their controllers. The other Idea is take the robot home with you and leave it in your shed like I should if my old team thinks about dismantling the robots to save space in the very distant future =). Then again the robot during my time is about 1 1/2 - 2 ft off the ground and about the max length & width you can make a robot not to mention they'd be only able to gut the inside since the frame is welded top to bottom - front to back.

Re: Storage Space & Previous Robots
 

All our robots from 2001-2005 are witting around our shop in various stages of disrepar/repair/cannibalization. We also have two kitbots sitting around and a few parts from 2000 scattered here and there. 2001 is completely inoperable and almost completely cannibalized (it gave up between 2003 and 2004). 2002 is pretty much undrivable, but could still work otherwise. 2003 is dying slowly, but 2004 and 2005 are fully operable or close to it. The two kitbots have been stripped of their electronics, so they can't operate at all.

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You know Andrew at one point in our teams history that whole room was ours closet, tables ah the good ol days. We need that empty shop next to autos. ahh what dreams we have.

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our team has 3 places were we keep robots and etc. they go by the names of: 1.secret storage
2. super secret storage
and 3: super super secret storage

secret storage is i small closet/ room in the back of our shop as well as several large metal closet locker things. they have battery's materials and spare parts

super secret storage is a separate small closet/room that is not connected to any other rooms and can only be entered from outside. it has our old robots some working most not

super super secret storage is a large crate(the kind you see on cargo ships)in the back of our school. i don't even know whats in it! :eek:

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The Martians keep three in a team built display case at the high school. This picture was taken just as it was being installed, it was not filled with trophies and pictures yet.

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The HOT Team has all of our robots back to 2000 stored and displayed at the GM Milford Proving Grounds building in which we work. There is a large area at the end of a hallway that we have set up with display lights where we keep our old robots, FIRST awards, and peer awards on display. (The right half of which is seen in the below photo)

Pictured above: the 2001 HOTBOT, the 2004 OCCRA bot, and the 2002 HOTBOT.

However, the GM just renovated the upper part of the building, and we had to move all of the robots and awards into a conjoining room just to the right of the original display area. (The right half of the temporary storage is pictured below)

Pictured above: 2002 HOTBOT, 2004 HOTBOT, 2004 OCCRA bot, 2001 HOTBOT.

We also use a huge room directly above the machine shop, which contains very large heating and cooling units, as additional storage. In there we have a bunch of random stuff, our old shipping crate (which now has lots of tubing joints, a garden hose, old software from autodesk, among tons of other crap in it), a new roll of carpet we got from GLR last year, 2 old TVs (not sure if they work), and lots of binders. We also used to have our practice fields up in that room as well.

Condition of Robots:
HOTBOTs:
2005: Almost fully working order, just some minor, competition-like fixes to make it run perfectly
2004: Drives like a champ, the claw on the arm was replaced last year with tongs to practice with tetras
2003: Rear drive turrets pretty much disassembled; lots of scavenging here. I think that the box stacker and self-righting mechanism would work fine if the RC is still in there, not sure if it is.
2002: Fully functional; runs sweet, hopper tilts back to dump, goal grabber works, but is disabled.
2001: A shell of a HOTBOT; it looks like it should, but under the skin most of the important stuff is gone or non functional.
2000: Another shell of a HOTBOT; looks like its former self, but has no controls left.
1999-1997: Completely disassembled and gone.

Other Robots:
2004 OCCRA bot: It's all there, but there are some major mechanical & electrical issues that would have to be resolved before it would even make a good driver training bot.
CASEY V1 (Community Awareness of Science and Education Year-round) Showbot: The 8 wheel drivetrain is probably functional, but using 25 pitch chain on drive wheels was a mistake, and constantly throws chains. The 'torso' of CASEY is next to it, just fine.

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Every generation of Chuck is stored in an abandoned Ames building. Now fully functional is a completely different story. They are not well displayed and honestly it reminds me of a robot grave yard. Still, it is very cool that they are all still around!

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We keep the majority of our past robots that are in one piece at our playing field in Nypro. The robots are suspended from the ceiling it sort of creates a museum. There are a couple robots that have been taken apart, so there just lying around the playing field. The '92 robot is actually in a glass case at school with some of the awards we've won over the years.

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You know A Thought came to mind while reading these posts & listening to Styx - Mr.Roboto, What if FIRST made 2 games for their 15 year anniversary. One for the first half of that year and another for the second half of the year. The First game will be decided upon by the Game Design Committee and would require 6 weeks of blood and sweat. The Second Game would be a voted decision made by the teams on which game should be replayed (namingly making it the best game FIRST has ever came up with that it needed to be replayed) The Regional Directors have the ultiumate decision if they would like to hold a second regional. Any of the robots may enter past and or current - provided they meet FIRST Rules and Regulations. There would be 6 Weeks of Build / Prep time and would start somewhere in May / June - that way teams have time to get materials to repair whatever damage was done at Nationals or to repair the past damages due to the robot being no longer needed. The Catch that only crosses my mind is that if the the game voted on is Autonomous Enabled Teams have the option to buy at IFI's discretion a current brand new controller setup at a discounted / full price. (Or if FIRST has chosen to do so; include with the entry fee and teams can have it mailed to their school, sponsor or robot building location for pickup and Since I do not know how well the Field Controller would be able to communicate with both PBasic and C++ Robot Controllers; that would also be a major deciding factor that would judge whether or not A complete overhaul of the teams competing Robot Controllers would be needed) Rules for that games robots would change to allow the old 3/8 & 1/2 Bosch Drill Motors and whatever motors were used in the past and to allow all the electrical components. Chances are LEDs may be shipped with new robot controllers - if they're still around that is and rules will also change to allow the rotating light and these items would be subtracted from the weight and be charged seperately. Would you the teams entering in it want to enter your old robots in to the competition (Robots 10 - 12 yrs old still working and competing in the FIRST Robotics Competitions like it where yesterday) - or - a different idea would be instead of hosting 2 games for a 15 yr anniversary, 1 game would be chosen from the past by either FIRST or the Teams to be replayed under the same robot guidlines said above. Except Build season would be under the normal timeline that exists now.

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If either of those ever happened I hope it'd be the first one. One of the great things about FIRST is that they DON'T repeat the same game year after year. If they did do a throwback game I could see many teams analyzing the most successful robot from that year and just doing slight variations of it.

Now if they did a "throwback" game that had different parts from different games but combined them together into something new, that could be a bit more interesting.

I like the sound of all these "robot museums", but sadly I don't think we could ever find room for one.

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Yeah all nine of them are there. Now that we are done with our last regional this year we will be adding one more. A total of ten.

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How about a way larger playing field - and the combined games of Diabolical Dynamics 2001 (Use the Bridge), FIRST Frenzy - Raising the Bar 2004 (For the excessively overweight mobile goals and chin up bar) and this years game Aim High 2006 (For the Center goal), The Weight would be increased to 135 - 140lbs w/o the battery and LED's or Lights w/ Electrical Wires.

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we have space on both sides of the boarder.. in the american side we have a tool crib in the welding shop with 2 robots, competition 2005, practice 2006, and on the canadian side in the machine shop we have 2005 practice and 2006 competition (well soon).. we try to keep them functional for doing demonstrations, except our 2005 competition bot got diced for electronics because we didnt have the money for new .

keeping a past robot is invaluable for demondstrations and programming!

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I love the bridge. I've been dreaming of a bridge for the past month in next year's game.

It looks like for now I will be keeping the 2006 robot at my house until we clean out our closet more. Our 2004 robot is already partially apart (missing the RC, victors, circuit breakers, and some other things), so it will likely go the rest of the way apart then, although we may keep the base and a few other things together for something to test with this summer.

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I agree with Martinez, that's Mr. Martinez to you guys ... it is kind of like a robot grave yard at the Ames building. But let's be fair ... we're a Chuck without a Country. There are 10 Chucks that were built in 5 locations. Chuck (the 1st) was built in Scranton PA. Chuck R2 & Pi were built at GPU Energy. Chucks C-IV ("We're Explosive"), V, VI, VII, & VIII were all built at the Towanda Middle School wood shop. Chuck IX was built at the Towanda Vo-Tech. and Chuck X at the Athens High School shop.

We are fortunate that one of our mentors, Ken "the Electron Shepherd" is "tight" with the owner of the Ames building ... otherwise ... who knows where all the Chucks would live ...

Besides this year's Bot there is Chuck (the 1st) through Chuck IX hanging out at the Ames building. And YES ... It IS very "cool" :cool: that they are ALL still around ... well said Jeff! ...

I've been with Chuck since the first Chuck and "I have a dream": We can rebuild "Him", we can make "Him" better.

Particularly, I have a desire to rebuild the Original Chuck ... not because he was a "Good" Chuck but because he was the "First" Chuck. Back when they were 36" square, had to deal with toroids (and didn't fit through doors very well) ... also want/need to rebuild those Chucks that did well ... Like Chuck Pi, Chuck Seven (who was once ... for one year ... Seven of Nine!), Chuck Nine (who's actually in pretty good shape) ... Chuck Six also ... AND Chuck X ... plan to keep him in good working shape.

Anyway ... retirement is coming (in 15 years or so) maybe then there will be time (and money) for project Phoenix ...