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Originally Posted by Tristan Lall
Or better still, if a team can buy from any company, why not set up a shell company (e.g. "Team 188 Inc."), and instruct the company to buy the parts whenever it pleases, and have them in stock. Then the afternoon of the kickoff, it would sell the parts to the team for $1. This is obviously not a "nice" thing to do, but under the rules we're now formulating, it seems completely legal.
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Under the 2004 rules I would argue that this shell company would be illegal unless its services are offered to other teams across Canada, America, Mexico, Brazil, England, and wherever else the next international teams pop up. Well, I should say that it would be illegal to record the cost of a certain gear/sprocket as $1 against your $3,500 limit. I’m not sure if that was the intended result of this scenario, but I think that this kind of circumventing of the spirit of the rule would be inappropriate. The idea of a shell company is also unnecessary under the current rules, since you can stock up on components (like raw materials, gears stock from any catalog, sprockets stock from any catalog, etc.) legally in the off-season. Any modifications to the stock products obviously have to be done after the kickoff.
Andrew,
You’re correct that 0.7M gears weren’t the best item for me to use in my example. I only used them because of experiences and stories from teams.
Another interesting question would be “does the JoeBob company have to make a concerted effort to advertise their product(s) to ALL FIRST teams?” I would think that the answer to this is “no.” It isn’t fair at all, but think about all the teams who don’t know about any catalog other than MSC/SPI and who don’t have a member here on ChiefDelphi. I didn’t know about the Sheppard catalog that some teams bought their tank treads from until long after the build period, but their products were available to me. Things like this make me lean even farther towards FIRST only allowing certain catalogs/sources for teams to buy their components from. Maybe not necessarily that you must have purchased the item from that catalog, but only the items listed in the catalog(s) which can be purchased from any other outfit. [Darn] am I glad I’m not writing the rules…