[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by dlavery

All of the sudden I am really longing for the "good ol' days" when you could only build your robot from the stuff in the kit, the specific additional parts list, and $425 of parts from Small Parts.
-dave

Dave No! I beg you NO! Don't do it, we'll rebel, we'll revolt! Now don't get me wrong, Small Parts is a great company that is a very reliable easy place to order stuff from and they have some really cool stuff that no where else does, BUT they are over priced and the selection is quite limited. The removal of the "parts from Small Parts only rule" and "additional parts list" was one of the best things I think ever happened to the robot rules. In 2002 our drive system failed miserably because we couldn't order steel gears because all Small Parts had was brass and that's the only place we could order from since they were not on the additional parts list.

Being limited by parts availability is one of the worst, most frustrating constraints in all of builidng robots. Let teams be limited by their imaginations and size and weight and strategy constraints, not by the availability (disavailability ?) of parts.