[Michael Blake]

This may have been mentioned earlier and I missed the post but I remember a video back in 2011 where Dean Kamen was explaining a purposeful _feature_ of FRC was the 6 Week Build-period.

Dean explained that he wanted FRC teams to have a close to real-life engineering experience where students were given a substantial project to complete, like professional engineers get everyday, without the best budget and not enough time.

I believe he said a survey was done of engineers asking generally how much time their bosses give them to take a concept and then deliver a working machine and the average time came out to 6 weeks--so that's the genesis right there.

I think we need to look at 6 week build as a baked-in pillar by the founder.

On our team since our 2nd season/2012 we have built full-twin practice bots (minus the powder coating) and we just keep whacking-on-it (our term for being iterative - lol) and moving the improvements over to the comp bot till our season ends--we never stop improving/learning.

But we're a well-funded team, hopefully again this season, and I get the cost barrier to some teams to producing a 2nd practice bot. However, there's a way around this, not perfect but it works, and is the approach we took in our Rookie year/2011 when we unexpectedly were on the Alamo winning alliance and on our way to Champs.

What we did was take a load of pictures and exact measurements of our only bot before it was bagged/tagged and impounded for Champs and then we built an inexpensive wood-framed replica of the chassis/structures in order to add an extensive Minibot feature that was completely missing from our competition bot. We put the wood chassis on casters and hand pushed the "bot" to approach and line-up for Minibot deployment--it worked really well in the shop and when we dismantled and installed on the bot in St. Louis everything fit perfectly.

Because of this approach of finding a way to make it work... we were able to have a new offensive capability that resulted in Ranking 17th in Archimedes in 2011--though no one picked us--yes it still stings. ;-)

I only provide this info to highlight that there are ways to achieve success even with a 6 Week Build-period _and_ not enough money to have a second practice bot.

--Michael Blake