[archiver]

Posted by Raul.

Engineer on team #111, Wildstang, from Rolling Meadows & Wheeling HS and Motorola.

Posted on 1/14/2000 10:16 PM MST


In Reply to: Confessions of FIRST veteran... posted by Joe Johnson on 1/14/2000 6:34 PM MST:




: Now... Can anyone help us find a portable lathe & CNC mill for our pit area so that we can manufacture parts at the Regionals? ;-)

The HOT team and the TechnoKats bring a trailer full of machine tools with them to the regionals. In light of the new rule, this will be a big advantage. It will be important to be their friends.

Hey Andy Baker, can I be your best friend again?

On a more serious note: We have no choice but to live by the rules and I will make sure we have plenty of raw materials to work with at the competition. However, how much can you really do if you find out that you made a serious mistake in your design? One cannot realistically make serious design changes under those conditions.

In the past our team also added a few tweaks to our design. Last year it was a new hook design; it was design ahead of the ship date but not assembled in time to be tested. Two years ago, we added a simple way to knock balls off the rails.

However, in those two years we did not change a single thing before going to Rumble at the Rock even though there was no rule against it. That is because our design was tweaked by the the time we competed at the Great Lakes regional and need no further changes. All we needed was to tweak our strategy and get our drivers more practice.

I wondered off on a tangent. The point I'm trying to make is that it will be really sad for teams that realize they have a faulty design that could easily be fixed a home in a couple of full days. But with the new rules they will just have to go to the next competition knowing that they have less of a chance of winning because of an obvious flaw.

Good luck to all teams and I hope you do not miss a not so obvious requirement that you will not be able to fix later.

Raul