With one swing, 8 tubs broken and plastic splinters flying everywhere. I’m proud to say that everyone was wearing safety glasses at the time. ALWAYS wear your safety glasses!
During our STUDoBOT activities, we were evaluating the Jimmy Connors/Tiger Woods/Babe Ruth strategy where the first automated move is to whack the tubs with a racket/club/bat going at a high rate of speed (not too difficult to do with a set of nested tubes and some surgical tubing), we swung a 10' long 1" schedule 40 PVC like a baseball bat at a height of about 4.5'. It was very effective, knocking most of the tubs down the ramp into scoring position, BUT the plastic went everywhere. Unofficially, 8 tubs were broken BUT are still usable (tops were NOT riveted).
Although one can view "fragile" containers as a bad thing, I think that it is a VERY good thing. If we were using something like the Rubbermaid Totes (these are the soft plastic tubs that you can run over with a car in -50 degree weather and they’ll survive with only a scratch), I’d expect to see the above Babe Ruth strategy generating tip velocities in excess of 150 mph. We’d have to provide hazardous duty pay to the referees. Cheers to FIRST for picking "fragile" containers.
I'm starting to believe that breaking boxes this year will be analogous to tearing up the carpet from last year. Some teams will spend 6 weeks trying to cushion the impact only to show up at a regional to find out that teams are consistently breaking containers with their opening move and ultimately winning because of their speed to the containers. Although I’m not exactly sure how you would do it, hopefully FIRST will set some guidelines on destruction of containers. Maybe we could use Dave (dlavery) to stand in front of the mechanism and whack him to see if it hurts since HE is the one that came up with this game
Take care,
Lucien
P.S. Please send all hate mail to my personal email address ...Dave.Lavery@mypersonalemail.com