Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

My friend and I were given the task of making a casing for our battery, to hold it on the robot. So we decided to make it out of very thin metal.(since it weighed next to nothing:) ) Only problem was that when we were driving the robot around, testing the drive shafts, the positive and negitive ends of the batteries both touched the metal at the same time!

:ahh: Causing thick heavy sparks to fly 15 feet in the air!!:ahh:

We got the battery out of the way before the battery fried, and scrapped the metal holder for a plastic one. The irony of this story is that me and my friend are both on the programming/Electrical team!:D This happened in the first week out of six, and not a day has past where we were not reminded about it.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Man Oh Man...this is the best thread. Im glad I made it. Clearly all of us have some kind of accident. Tough kids we are haha.;)

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Nothing is better than the time we wrapped our battery with copper wire at UC Davis and during a safety inspection pulled our battery out and needless to say the battery touched and arched and then continued to melt through the outer casing of our battery....... we don't use this battery anymore.... and I still was named captain this year even after my many misshapes over the last two years.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

at comp last year, our mentor clipped his finger with the battery and was bleeding while we were on the field and we didnt have a bandaid but we had eletrical tape, and to make a long story short, eletrical tape is now called a first band-aid at our meetings

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We decided that if someone dies, we would name the robot after ME!
(In all seriousness, an electrical cord snapped on me (someone was standing on it) and it snapped back and hit me in the nose slightly: Im alive...but I really wanted the robot to be named Jake)

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

This is staged. He really did get the staples in the head from the robot falling (and he is just fine) but we had some fun with the staple gun and camera.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

"Oh crap, it's really bleeding now..."

That says it all. Our driver should be on razor blade restriction...

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Where do i start:

1. band saw blade broke 2 times in 30 minutes.
2. debris from hack saw sliced my skin above my lip open
3. mill bit broke and flew into my neck
4. extremely hot (purple and blue) aluminum shavings from the lathe caused 2nd degree burns on my neck.
5. drill pres snagged on metal casing it to spin out of control and sliced my hand.
6. soldering iron burns
7. drill bit snagged hand and drilled through glove.
8. the robot's hand closed pinching the finger of our other machinist on the team.
9. safety captain gets his finger sliced open practically to the bone

this all happened this year and for the record were not jinxes these were all wierd things that in the 2 years ive been active have never ever happened.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

What has happened to me that I remember from this build season:

Burned myself quite a few times, once with the little butane torch we use on the lexan to get nice smooth edges, and a few more times with the soldering iron, although my other electronics friend went and grabbed the iron on the wrong end(it was off but still kind of hot)

I have cuts up and down my arms from various bits of stuff, and I got another cut going around half my thumb it looks nasty, but its really shallow and I've cleaned it out a bunch

And I have plenty of bruises from Juggling clubs waiting for the robot

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Why were you wearing a glove when drilling? Now you know what happens--lots of pain.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

The TechnoKats, for the first time in a really long time, had someone go to the ER to get some stitches. We had two students over the past two days get some pretty deep cuts that required some skilled work from our un-certified medic, David Abney. Of course we have had minor cuts and scrapes.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

i was working on the mill drilling "speed holes". I was drilling through two 2x1s at once and the top one popped off and attacked me.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Wow some of those are nasty!

I haven't got more then a scratch in my entire 3 years in FIRST. But hard times... Thats another story.

Here’s the usual scenario for machining parts on team 100.

-sponsor's CNC mill breaks -2 day setback
-sponsor machinist sick -(we have to make the parts ourselves:ahh: )
-forced to make parts in mentor's garage but the power goes out
-forced to make parts in another shop... power goes out again :ahh:
-programmers tell us we need to make a gearbox week before ship :ahh:

We also discovered this year that one of our mentors had installed a secret button on his mill to prevent strangers from turning it on;) It took at least an hour to find the little blighter which was disguised as a bolt!:eek:

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

That was a hardware problem as well as software. The gearbox was replacing a system of two seperately driven motors. You do not want to run two worm drives unless you are comletely sure that they will run at the exact same speed. With the speed controllers that we're using, one motor would go faster than the other, and something would be destroyed by the force put on the worm gears. There was no way to easily prevent this.

On a completely unrelated note, last year we managed to break a wire cutter on a ziptie. Luckily, no one was hurt.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Well lets see.....

Last year, we had a table fall on one of our students after "hugging" it.
Also one of our mentors (cough cough kim) had some trouble with a box cutter and soda can......yea that wasn't pretty.:ahh: :(