Nightmare Repairs At Competition

[Chris is me]

So I just got back from the WPI Regional and I've got a story to tell. As I was preparing this thread, I saw 237's awesome transmission repair and knew there had to be a ton more of these kinds of clever, dirty repairs in FIRST. So I thought I'd wrap our little story into a general thread so that the whole CD community can hear about different teams' ingenuity under pressure.

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So in our last qualifying match, after we had secured the number 1 seed, we went to hang for 10 and then suddenly our arm snapped all the way back. We had sheared a 20 tooth pinion on the arm. We swapped for our spare so we'd be ready for the first quarterfinal, and what do you know, it happens again. Perhaps we should have decided not to hang, but since the gear lasted through a regional and a half we thought we were safe...

At this point, panic starts to set in. We were out of 20 tooth gears, so a lot of the team thought we were done. Out of utter desperation, a few students and I dig through the pits trying to find ANYTHING that works. We ask any team we can find if they even used Vex gears. No dice. We dig through our own supply just trying to find anything that can work.

One of our mechanical students finds the 19 tooth, 3/8 Hex drivetrain gears, hands them to me, and asks if they will work. We have to try. I sprint the gears down to the machine shop for secondary operations while I tell another student to let the drive team and repair crew know that a spare is on the way. I run it down the street to the machine shop (it's in another building) and then ask if they can broach it. They say yes, if they can get a hex broach. I ask them to bore it out to 1/2" while I go find one.

Scrambling through the pits, I explain to the students the situation and they quickly find our hex broach. Since I'm out of shape, it's their turn to sprint to the machine shop with a part while I go explain more about the repair to the pit crew. I vaguely remember a member of the repair crew looking at me like I was crazy, but it was our only shot.

The gear makes it to the field with one match to spare and... it's too thick. They hand it to me and I sprint right back to the machine shop, asking them to take 1/8" off the gear. Fortunately, the 8th alliance called a timeout for an unrelated reason, which was just enough time for me to run back with the gear and for our wonderful pit crew to get it back onto the robot. We decide to line up for the 2 point goal, because frankly we have no idea what will happen to our robot in autonomous mode, and we all cross our fingers and hope this modification does the trick.

It does. We scored in autonomous that match, and while we were done trying to hang, our teleop performance looked completely unaffected. Just one change in code and we had our 3/3 top goal autonomous working every single match after this one. If we hadn't stopped hanging at this point, it would have looked like nothing had ever happened. This is one of my team's (and my own!) proudest moments in robotics. We didn't give up, we scrambled and improvised under pressure and it totally paid off.

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So there's our story. How about yours?

[Koko Ed]

I'd say 1592 and 801's beats everybody's story for all time.

[MARS_James]

I can't recall the year or the team and while not technically a repair I do remember a teams robot was shipped somewhere else for nationals and they had to build a new one from scratch

[PVCpirate]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

I can't recall the year or the team and while not technically a repair I do remember a teams robot was shipped somewhere else for nationals and they had to build a new one from scratch

Found it http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...highlight=1396

[Koko Ed]

Our 2008 robot suffered a Catastrophic breakdown(the disaster occurs at 7:53 at the end of the first finals match which we won. Unfortunately we weren't coming back from this at that point. Ironically we won the Quality Award.

[rsisk]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Our 2008 robot suffered a Catastrophic breakdown(the disaster occurs at 7:53 at the end of the first finals match which we won. Unfortunately we weren't coming back from this at that point. Ironically we won the Quality Award.

Judges worst nightmare....

And the Quality award goes to.... The smoldering heap of metal over there

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by rsisk

Judges worst nightmare....

And the Quality award goes to.... The smoldering heap of metal over there

John was chuckling while reading off the award.

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Our 2008 robot suffered a Catastrophic breakdown(the disaster occurs at 7:53 at the end of the first finals match which we won. Unfortunately we weren't coming back from this at that point. Ironically we won the Quality Award.

That reminds me of a team we competed against in 2012 whose shooter broke off twice and still won the Quality Award. Funny how that happens.

The biggest nightmare repair I've been a part of was in 2011, we fried both our cRIO AND our 2 digital sidecars. Found out during the second and more extensive replacement session (included cRIO and multiple suspect wires) that we had pinched and shorted the connector between the two.
Missed a couple matches, still ended up 8-4 alliance captain #7. Lost in the first round. :/

Funniest repair (what?) was at Sweet Repeat in 2006, we popped a pneumatic front tire and had to replace it. Got the tire and axle on, but didn't have time to put the second bolt through the aluminum pillow block, so we zip-tied it on.
On the field, after auto, we drive forward and stop, but the wheel keeps rolling forward. We then proceed to leave a trail of parts behind us for about 2 feet and eventually fall over for the rest of the match.

[martin417]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

I'd say 1592 and 801's beats everybody's story for all time.

+1 to this.

My favorite emergency repair story is from 2009. We had an intake roller made from polycarb tube. It worked perfectly through two reginals, championships, and IRI, but during practice matches at GRITS (offseason competition) we collided with another robot and broke the roller in half. We hadn't brought much in the way of tools or parts, so we thought we were done.

I and another student made a dash to a local hardware store and had no luck finding anything that could be substituted. Then the student found a piece of chrome sink drain that was a tight fit inside the polycarb tube. The hardware store was kind enough to cut off a piece of the drain tube, we also bought some super glue. Back at the venue, we covered the drain tube with super glue, and pressed both broken parts over the tube. We were back in business and ended up winning the competition.

In 2011 the gear on our arm sheared a few teeth. The one type of gear we needed, nobody else had. So instead of taking it off, we improvised. If we wanted to raise our arm, I would go from full forward to full reverse, and the inertia would move the arm up, the lost teeth would be skipped, and the teeth from the driving gear would catch with the unsheared teeth on the arm and raise the arm up. While we weren't an effective scoring robot in Logomotion, we were able to get our arm up. The nightmarish part was for me having to go full-power forwards to full-power backwards with a top-heavy robot without tipping. I got it down after a while, but we spent a lot of time on the practice field working on me not tipping the robot over (which ultimately I did anyways).

[James1902]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

I'd say 1592 and 801's beats everybody's story for all time.

This.

I won't try to top the 1592/801 story but 1902 had a crazy repair moment at Atlanta in 2007. Before our final match on Galileo one of our BaneBot motors we used to power our arm released the magic smoke. (First time we had a problem with it all season.) We called the time out a raced to replace it. The problem was we had mounted an aluminum box around the motor that refused to come off, making the exchange a challenge.
With the clock ticking, and the field reset crew calling our robot to the field, one of our college mentors got out his hammer, stepped on to the robot cart, and began to persuade the casing and motor off as we were carting the robot to the field.
Luckily we were able to get everything fixed just in time for the match. We won the match, won the division, and got a trip to Einstein.
Still one of my favorite memories from my days as a student.

[lorem3k]

In 2011, our head programmer decided to build a new electronics board as a part of our 30lbs withholding allowance. It was a wonderfully compact design, and we were excited to put it on the robot at conpetition. However, he forgot to account for a pneumatic cylinder that was placed smack in the middle of where he planned to put the new board, so we spent our entire first day in Toronto fractically building a new one, and much of the next day trying to make everything work the way it did before we bagged the robot. We went on to win the regional with 1114 and 1503.

[Lil' Lavery]

Paging Rich Kressly, Chuck Glick, or Mike Williams. I'd want someone more involved with the actual repair to tell the story of how they fixed our claw in 2008 after it broke during the last qualification match before we had to be on the field for QF1-1 as the #8 alliance captain.

[coalhot]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Paging Rich Kressly, Chuck Glick, or Mike Williams. I'd want someone more involved with the actual repair to tell the story of how they fixed our claw in 2008 after it broke during the last qualification match before we had to be on the field for QF1-1 as the #8 alliance captain.

I remember this, walking around the pits in Philly 2008 and seeing the arm split in half. If I recall, you guys got it completely replaced with the spare in time to have a fully functional robot in the first quarterfinals match. It was quite impressive.

[Kyle A]

My junior year on the team, 2006 Aim High (edit), The robot we shipped in the crate was far from perfect. The hopper to hold the balls was non existed the shooter kind of worked part of the time, and the electronics were out in the open. When we got to the Pittsburgh Regional and opened the crate there was a ton to do. Going out for our first match, everything was held on by zip ties and velcro straps. After 2 matches of not making any shots we had a team meeting, a few robots that were only dumpers were really good, and we had a vote to rebuild the robot from a shooter to a dumper. It was decided to go for the dumper, so a group of us started striping the robot down to its frame. Another group started going through all the spare parts we brought. we had angle, aluminum plate, lexan, and a ton of rivets, so we got to work. With some help from some other teams we cut the aluminum in half forming 2 triangles, while another group used a heat gun to bend the lexan into a shape that would work. After riveting everything into place onto the frame, we went out for our last practice math after missing 3, The robot worked pretty good we could pick balls up and dump them into the one point goals, but when picking up a few balls would fly right out of the hopper, and also at the end of the match we were back heavy and tipped of the ramp. Back in the pit we had a bunch of those fold up hampers, so we took and riveted one to each side of the hopper, tested and it worked great. Next we had to figure out how to stop tipping, we looked around for a bit and finally picked what to do. In the pit we had 2 steelface heads, our team mascot, cut out of steel for decoration. We bolted it to the front of our robot, and went for final inspection, we passed at the last moment.
I know it is not a nightmare repair like other teams have had but it is one that I will always remember, and I feel for teams like 1592 and 801 because I know it is not fun rebuilding a robot in one day. below is a picture of before and after.


I also remember one year a teams robot crate was shipped upside down and they had to rebuild, can't remember the team or year though.