[Mark Sheridan]

I have to agree with Dustin. The 6 week build is a burden on our sponsors. The build season is during the last leg of the fiscal year, so a lot of companies are expediting to finish projects including my own. It takes up a lot of my own time but also shop time that were able to procure. Often our parts are being made in over-time. This makes determining part value tricky because of we were to report the overtime cost, it would be huge. hence, we are often forced to have an mentor to make the part to make its value zero, adding to burn-out. At this point we are begging machinists, engineers and technicians to come in to see the robot and talk about their jobs in an effort to add them to our mentor list.

To give use more time with our resources, it would be nice to make parts in November "at risk." We could then have extra time during the build season, time to have students present/operating the machines, and a chance to start CAD models earlier. Also this would prevent us from getting to carried away, because everything is at risk, so we would limit ourselves to common parts or risk making an obsolete part once the game is announced. Of course every year we compete with the pros and cons of the kit-bot frame because it could give us the same savings in time. However, drive trains have not been the bottle neck in our builds.

I should add, I don't think I would give up the practice bot even with a extend season. It has been very nice to have it around for spare parts. Also having a second data point has been nice to catch a few technical issues.