Quote:
Originally Posted by Racer26
I really don't understand why the bumper rules are such an annual sticking point. Anybody with some fabric, pool noodles, plywood, and a staple gun can build legal bumpers in an hour or two.
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They're a problem for so many teams every year because teams ignore/forget about them until the last minute. Everyone is so focused on getting the robot built, that they don't bother with bumpers until the last minute, and even at that point they stick their least-capable students on it while everyone else focuses on the "harder stuff".
If more teams thought about bumpers earlier, and spent the time to make them right, then they wouldn't be a problem for anyone. For my team, we had one of our best students sign up to do bumpers, and she started on them a week before Stop Build Day... after she finished designing and building our climbing arm. The bumpers are reversible, look great, and can be mounted quickly (in fact, they mount quicker than any other set of bumpers we've had). Treating the bumpers as equally important as any other part of the robot leads to them looking just as good as the rest of the robot!