[Jon Stratis]

I've never hassled a team for having a pre-assembled gear box before. Teams that have come in overweight I've often had take off motors and/or gear boxes (including separating the motor and gear box) in order to make weight with everything else. The time a team invests in making weight for their withholding is a good lesson for them moving forward (while instituting a "time penalty" to make things fair with respect to everyone else at the event), and it's rare I see the same team make the mistake two seasons in a row.

That said, when it comes to my own team, I don't let them just use an old gearbox that was assembled in a previous season as-is. They need to take the gearbox apart, clean it up (old grease isn't necessarily a good thing, it can get full of contaminants and other stuff!), check to make sure none of the gears are worn down significantly, and then finally re-grease and re-assemble. There's a lot a student can learn about how a gearbox works doing this that they otherwise wouldn't see!