Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
Define "bumper material"
The "black material" was Cordura. Cordura is also the bumper material recommended in the FRC manual.
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I believe everyone referring to "bumper material" is referring to the 1000D Cordura recommended in the Game Manual. That is a Nylon fabric. The low bar flap is Cotton Duck Canvas per the Field Drawings, and referred to only as "Cordura" in the Game Manual. Cotton is very different than Nylon.
We built our low bar out of the field spec Cotton Duck Canvas (Cordura brand). It definitely is much softer and much more liable to get caught on and ripped. We have practiced on both, and have ripped the Duck Canvas but never the Cordura 1000D Nylon.
I too am confused as to the reasoning behind not going with the more robust cloth method. It's possible they determined that even though 1000D holds up better, it still wont's survive an event. It's also possible that they could not source and fabricate enough flaps in time to get them to the fields (though I'm not sure why, there are Jo-Ann's everywhere).
I'm curious to see what the ruling is going to be when the first flap gets caught in a drivetrain or an intake wheel and disables a robot. Is that a field fault, does it warrant a replay? I hope FIRST is discussing this scenario with the head referees, because many teams will be loading in tomorrow that didn't plan for and don't have quick fixes to make their robot able to handle the new design.