[russell]

First some explanation: I am currently in my second year of FIRST, and on a second year team. We are still trying to finish our robot, and it looks like we will make it in time, but now I am getting off topic.

My point is that today I realised that both this year and last year we had a wonderful robot designed with all sorts of wonderful mechanisms each of which should work wonderfully. And the total of the weights of all the mechanisms is not even close to the weight limit. Then we put all the mechanisms together, and while it all works OK we realise that we are overweight, and this or that part weighs a lot and doesnt really gain us much so just like that there goes half the robot. In the last two days we have gone from having a wonderful unique awesome looking machine, to having a rectangular prism, with wheels and a stick it can wave around.

Do other teams have this problem or is it just us? One of our problems is that we dont really design things, or when we do we dont design them to work together, we just design individual parts, then find a way to bolt them together later. But even so, it is still odd...