[dlavery]

Chuck-

I would just offer two comments:

- the safety judges at the competitions are just that - judges. They have no enforcement authority at all. They should not be directing you to do anything, and certainly do not have the authority to tell you to remove anything from your pit area. They can - out of a legitimate safety concern - suggest that you might or might not want to use some item. But they can not direct you to do so. The majority of the safety judges are very good, well meaning volunteers. However, every now and then a small subset of them get a little bit over zealous (anyone else remember the "you have to wear gloves when lifting your robot" debacle from last year?). The only people at the event that have the responsibility to enforce the rules are the referees (on the field), the robot inspectors (for the robot), and the authorized FIRST-appointed lead positions. And even they just have the authority to enforce the existing rules as written - they are not to make up any new ones.

- that said, one of the desired uses of the small air compressor mentioned is something to avoid. Using compressed air to blow chips out of a mechanism is a very bad idea. In any reasonable-quality machine shop, you will almost always find that this is a prohibited practice. The problem is that blowing chips out causes them to fly everywhere, and you have no control over their direction or final destination. They can, and frequently do, end up embedded in electronics, thrown into gears, stuck on precision surfaces, or tossed just about anywhere else that they don't belong (I have had to completely tear down and rebuild lathe chucks that were completely jammed with swarf that had been blown into the mechanism by inexperienced "machinists" more than once). In the worst case, chips can fly back towards you where they can drift around safety glasses and into your eyes. If you need to remove chips from a machined area, a shop vac is a much better tool of choice.

-dave