My first FIRST event was the SCRRF Pre-Ship Scrimmage at Chatsworth HS on the Sunday before ship in 2002. The Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday, before, we had a ton of drivetrain problems most remembered by our lead engineer saying "What is all the cr*p in those gears!" The Saturday before, we started working at about 8AM and we worked late into the night and into the early morning. I remember using a giant single speed electric drill (that thing was a monster) at about 3:00 AM Sunday to cut treads in our tires. I would start cutting a groove in the tread and then all of a sudden it was done cutting but for some reason the drill was still running. I had fallen asleep with a running drill in my hand.
And then we needed to mount the rotating light. So we measured it three times to make sure it was just right, then we drill the holes and go to mount it and the hole is like an entire inch and a half off.
During this Saturday night, even our teacher had gone to sleep under a table. We were all so exhausted. So here it is 7:00 AM on Sunday. Our guy with the van rolls up and we load the robot in. He goes off to the scrimmage and I go home to eat and get like 5 mins of sleep. Well, that 5 mins ended up to be about 40. Anyway, after that, I went out to the event. When I got there I was surpirsed to see the rest of my team just standing around. I asked if we had a match coming up. They said no. I asked if they played a match. They said yes. I asked how it went, and they told me the gears had stripped and we were done. None of us knew what to do. We had spent all build period designing this Chia+drill drivetrain and all week working the bugs out and in our first match the gears strip. It turns out that they were pulling two goals and once (which we knew we could do fine) and then tried to turn (which disintegrated the drivetrain).
So there we were in the pit with a broken robot we could not fix. Seeing we needed some help, some random gentleman comes over offering his assistance. We told him the situation, and he took a look at our robot. He asked what was wrong and we told hime the gears stripped. He asked if it made any noise and we said yes, a very loud noise. They he asks, "was it a clicking noise or a clacking noise" we all just turn to each other and burst into laughter. It was like, "what's the difference" and "what difference does it make, our robot is broken". Anyway, it turns out that this guy was Doug Hogg (team 980) and to this day he has been one of the most helpful people to our team (like offering spare drill motors in 2004 LA regional when no one was at the spare parts table).
So, back to our 2002 robot. We left the scrimmage early and returned to our shop. We tried to find replacement gears out of a stronger material but had no success. So, we ended up pulling the chias and running with just the drills. Then we had all sorts of drill clutch problems. We did not have a reliably running robot until midnight. I woke up at 8AM on saturday and worked straight through until midnight on Sunday. 40 hours straight. And that was my first year on the team.
Anyway, in the entire LA regional, we finally had no problems whatsoever with the drivetrain, and performed minimal maintanance on the rest. We mostly sat in the pit with our feet up on the robot watching all the other teams scurry to fix their broken machines. We were finally rewarded for all that time we put in per-ship.