[tennispro9911]

My advice is anytime your intuition tells you something, double check it with physics. That's something that's served me well is to both trust my gut, but make sure my gut is correct, and make sure someone else confirms that if I am designing something critical to my robot's success such as a gearbox. Also, don't view criticism as negative, but rather that all of the people on CD want to make sure that come competition, everyone has a working robot.