[EricH]

Originally Posted by makahn64

There should definitely be a deadline for stopping build otherwise teams will dawdle. But why not a 12 week build? Six is nuts and takes a lot of my personal time and frankly too much of my work time away. Many of us smaller teams do not have the mentor resources to spread the pain, either.

Quite frankly, it'll now take 12 weeks of your personal time and work time.
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill time allotted.
Murphy's Corollary to Parkinson's Law: And then some.

Originally Posted by itsjustmrb

I would like to see the stop build day actually mean STOP BUILD!!! Let's forget about the extra 30 pounds of prefabricated parts and whatever you finish with on stop build is what you bring to competition.

For many years, this is actually what the rule was, or pretty close to it. Well, sort of. The amount of extra parts was unlimited for at least some of the time. Didn't stop some teams from bringing in raw material and completely rebuilding (or in some cases building) their robots. Is what they finished with on ship date what they brought to competition? Yes. Is it what they started competing with? No... because stuff was added. Stuff that showed up in raw material form.