[Tom Line]

Prior to this year, we always made the practice bot first, then the comp bot last.

This year, however, we were very determined to shrink our build schedule to 5 weeks. One of the biggest time savers that we saw available was to build the two simultaneously. As someone else mentioned, once you're all set up and making one part, making a duplicate at the same time is very quick.

This also allowed us to insure that the two robots were identical. In the past, making the robots at different times meant that the practice bot was very different from the final comp bot. That is bad for your drivers and your programmers.

We nearly made our 5 week build, though a machining hangup getting our turret completed lost us that week.