Quote:
Originally Posted by Sperkowsky
Wow our first choice list looks identical and so does our buy now list.
Except we opted to buy 2 versachassis sets instead of kit chassis. Also we plan on assembling some parts of the practice robot drive train pre-season. That is legal right?
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Our concept is to keep the AM-14U2's in the boxes until we decide what we're going to build, at least as far as overall dimensions, gear ratios, and wheel diameters are concerned. We are not disassembling our "COTS" gearboxes before build season, but if we decide that we will use one of them, we shall disassemble it back to COTS equivalency and reassemble it before including on the robot. This is actually a lesson we learned in and after Katrina, if in a somewhat different form; read the following paragraphs if you want the rather gory details.
Whew. Some people lost everything; came home to a slab. Some came home to something that still looked like home but was not worth rebuilding; some of them considered the "slabbers" to be lucky. Some came home to something that was worth rebuilding, even if we needed to make some decisions about refrigerators and freezers that had severely rotted food in them. I fall squarely into the last category; I needed a new roof, had about $1,000 of structural damage where a neighbor's water oak fell on the house, and all my food was beyond saving, but the house itself was well worth saving (I specifically selected a relatively high 19 foot elevation after having been flooded out back in 1995; Slidell's highest cross on the topo maps is 21 feet; Katrina flooding in Slidell came to just above the 10 foot contour). Mom and I cleared all of the food out of the freezer and refrigerator, and hoped that we could get the smells out sufficiently to justify saving it. I'm using my pre-K refrigerator-freezer to this day.
Katrina was followed quickly by Rita, (which made landfall a bit to our west, in my father's family's stomping grounds) but there had been very little rebuilding by that point. The next hurricane as far as I am concerned was Gustav, in 2006. (Yes, it's very similar to my full given name of Gustave, but so what; it didn't matter.) There were a significant number of people who suggested that, in getting ready for Gustav, we should place all of our refrigerated and frozen goods in the landfill before landfall. Seriously, they suggested that.
I came up with what I still consider to be a great combination of preparedness and compromise. Prior to the storm, I took everything out of the freezer, stuck it in a couple of garbage bags, tied the bags tightly shut, then put the bags back into the freezer. I did the same with the condiments and other "longer-life" items in the refrigerator. When the power outage proved to be about 2 hours, all I did was unpack the bags; I was out about $20 and 6 hours of work. If the outage had been measured in days, I could have simply pulled the bags and put them on the curb for pickup, with minimal proximity to the stink. Win-win, even in loss. The bottom line is that you need to plan and hope and be ready to take advantage of the best possibilities, while having a contingency plan that will see you through the worst.