[Joseph Smith]

My team, being in Michigan, builds a practice bot every year, and do programming work and driver practice with it after bag. Inevitably we have to make changes to the practice bot as we discover faults or problems during practice. We use our six hour access period to implement these changes to the competition bot, as well as test autonomus mode on it. The combination of practice bot + robot access time is extremely helpful for us because we can find the issues and have fixes ready before we unbag, implement them quickly, and have some time left over for practice/testing. This saves us from spending the first day at a District competition discovering issues and trying to fix them on the fly. Regarding the withholding allowance, we usually take a few mechanisms off of our practice bot or just manufacture some extra parts and bring them to competition with us as our allowance.