Many teams have different philosophies when it comes to managing the build period. Before you can decide on a schedule, you need to evaluate the resources at your disposal. How often and how long is your shop going to be open? How many students and mentors will be participating? Are your suppliers local, or will you be shipping parts in? What's your team's level of engineering experience? Do you need to prototype extensively, or can you trust yourselves to start building sooner? These are just some of the many questions that need to be asked.
The following is a presentation on running a FIRST team, which has a section on managing the build season. A proposed timeline is given, which has been used with much success by many Canadian teams.
http://firstroboticscanada.org/site/...ps/runteam.pdf
It's an aggressive schedule, designed for use by low to medium resource team with a simple robot design. It also works well for a high resources team with a more complicated design. The schedule stresses finishing earlier, to allow more time for practice and tweaking. I've found that the amount of time spent practicing and iterating is directly proportional to a team's success. Teams who are less aggressive during build, often end up using their regional as practice and tweak time.
1 To me, that's an expensive way to spend $4000. (And if you're only going to one regional, like 75% of teams, this is not a good situation to be in.)
The design freeze is much earlier than most teams use, but this a conceptual design freeze. What that means is that you're settling on "double jointed arm vs. linear elevator" as opposed to the specific implementation. This can be determined during the prototyping phase, and modified throughout the practice and tweaking phase. The 1114 robots always undergo significant changes during the final two weeks.
I hope this helps.
1. In 2006, when we were testing our robot in week 5, we realized that our hopper had major issues with ball jams. We played around with it for a few days until we finally determined we needed a new subsystem, an agitator, to clear jams. The agitator worked like a charm, and was a major part of our regional success. At our regionals, we helped many teams design and build their own agitators. These teams discovered their ball jam issues during these regionals, because of a lack of practice and tweaking time. As a result, these jams drastically decreased their scoring ability. Just an example of how valuable tweaking time can be.