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Unread 31-01-2005, 15:53
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BillCloyes BillCloyes is offline
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#0677 (The WireStrippers)
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Join Date: Jan 2002
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adding to the confusion

Not to add to the confusion but...

We printed our 2005 pneumatics manual off the First Pneumatics website within the first week after kickoff (and yes it was labeled 2005...).

It's order form included the 12" and 24" stroke (1.5" bore) pneumatics and so we designed our robot accordingly.

We were all prepared to order when I started seeing people asking questions on the Q&A board, so I download a "new copy" ...and those sizes were gone.

Soo we re-designed...and then go to place the order via the Bimba website (per the manual's instructions) and find that those sizes are once again available to FIRST teams to order as their free Bimba cylinders... so we went back to our original design (using the 1.5"-ers (it also happened to be cheaper)) and placed the order. The Bimba web tracking shows that they shipped 01/28/2005 (hoping we get them in the next few days).

At the time of writing this ,the only response that FIRST has given is that we should refer to the manual for clarification... and as I've read the manual and the order form and find that it throws things to the website (where all the ordering must be done anyhow...).
...and guessing by the view count on this thread, I'm not the only one who thinks there is some contradiction ("confusing statements", at best) within and between the Q&A board, the pneumatics manual, the order forms, and the order-placing-website.

From a slightly different angle... Being a team on a budget (a budget of actual funds available, not just as what we can put the robot), if it turns out that we are not allowed to use cylinders that we received through the "FIRST/Bimba free cylinder program", I would expect that we be allowed to exchange them for free legal sized cylinders and that FIRST pickup the tab for [overnight] shipping for causing the confusion.

This may seem like a tad bit much, but isn't the reasoning behind being limited to these certain sizes is to help "equal the field" by making all teams only use sizes that are available for free. If teams can't use the "free ones", isn't this defeating the purpose?

oh well...just my $.02

Last edited by BillCloyes : 01-02-2005 at 14:27. Reason: mild rant removed due to a cooler head prevailing