[jonathan lall]

Building a drivetrain is not so much a matter of how long, but rather of team coordination. I would contend that you cannot have a consistently good robot without equally good teambuilding. In order to make an original gearbox for example, you really should be streaming or subteaming your human capital. I thought of it sort of like an economic model while I was a student with a building and leadership role. If you don't specialize, you can still make a great robot but you can also say goodbye to a really good drivetrain for the simple reason that multiple tasks performed by the majority of the group in order put too much pressure on the group. There will of course be an opportunity cost of specialization (a perfect function might be forgone by allocating 30% of your students to making a good drivetrain), but the final yield will be much greater.

Let's go by Billfred's example. Even though most teams don't take quite that long to make a drivetrain, if you were to syphon off 30% of your students to a hierarchical subteam for mobility (or whatever the optimal percentage you might find to be), robot building gets a lot easier. New Canadian teams for example are encouraged by 188 to use our old team model of dividing the majority of the team into two subteams of Function and Mobility (the rest might be part of a publicity or fundraising group). We have since heavily tweaked this model, but it's a good starting point.

As for some tips about how to speed up your drietrain's construction, a look into the rules will help you out (disclaimer: they can and do change at the start of every season). For example, you can order certain materials and parts ahead of time and design your gearbox on CAD software before the build period even starts. Most veteran teams have this pre-build process mastered. In our case, the actual construction of our tranny/gearbox took nearly five weeks. Considering we hand-machined all our parts, that's rather good, I think. Still, the real gains you can make in terms of time to build your drivetrain are more in adminstration than technics and tools.