Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
I would say legal, but silly.
And here's why: Your bumpers must be easily removable for inspection. 2 people in under 5 minutes is the guideline.
Can your two people remove all the fasteners from your robot and get the bumpers off in 5 minutes if you put them all the way across? Particularly if they're also being used for cross-bracing, and aren't just running through clearance holes? Right.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "I only have to remove my bumpers once, and I'm good! I can live with that!" Wrong. All robots at the event are subject to reinspection at any time. More particularly if they're in decent range of a chance at eliminations, and it's Saturday morning, or if they've made changes. And as part of that reinspection, the weighing of the robot may be required. Just as a note, bumpers don't count towards robot weight. Guess what you now have to take off and put back on, and maybe you have a match in 10 minutes and are being called to queue up?
tl;dr: legal, sure, but it could bite you pretty good.
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I don't know how they do elims reinspection (or any reinspection for that matter), at your event, but at mine I try not to hassle the team's by making them take their bumpers off again, unless we really, really have to. The only situation it's really needed is if their robot weighed in close to the limit, and their new weight (subtracting out the recorded weight of the bumpers, I know, subtraction is hard!) indicates they might have gone over during the event.
All that said, sticking to the guideline outlined in the rules is important, because the odd situation does come up where you need to take off your bumpers and are pressed for time. But relatively few teams really fall within the guideline, unfortunately.
I'm glad to see this Q&A give the response I expected. Believe it or not, this exact same topic came up on Friday when I was working with a rookie team. We went over the rules and came to the same conclusion - there's nothing wrong with having a bumper support span the entire robot, right down the middle. For their plans it's fairly easy, and can be slipped on and bolted quickly.