All, I didn’t mean at all to criticize the green shirt safety judges.
I value and respect them and am truly glad they have become an integral part of the competitions. Our team strives very hard for the safety award and thus I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize our image with any of the safety judges at competition. I was simply getting stuff out to pack for competition and got to thinking about the small air compressor and thought about the safety judge last year in Atlanta and was wondering if I had missed something somewhere in the rules or Q&A, etc. The safety judge was in no way nasty about the issue and I am certain that he truly thought that there was some rule against it. Everyone is human and there was no issues or hard feelings at all on our part. I doubt most of the team even knew of it anyway. The whole conversation took place between the safety judge and myself and there may have been a couple of students in the pit at the time. I see now that my comments about the authority of the green shirt safety judges were not exactly worded very well. Sorry, I really wasn’t thinking much about it at the time.
Dave, thank you very much for the wise advice. I humbly admit that I have always taught the team to blow out the robot after any drilling, etc. was done on it prior to powering it up. Especially those Victors so as to not let the magic smoke out! After reading your well-rationalized post I see now that I have been teaching a poor practice to our team.
I see no reason for our air compressor in the pits now so no need to bring it. Thank you for taking a moment to educate me today! I appreciate very much when someone takes their time to teach me something especially if it is something I thought I was doing right but really wasn’t. I will pass the knowledge on.