Out of Stock - Motors/Gear boxes...

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by thefro526

Wouldn't it be nice if FIRST shared the game in some level of detail including motor allotments and basic robot rules with common vendors about 4-6 months ahead of the season? Should help the vendors develop new products and properly build stock for the coming game... No need to stock a bunch of Arm transmissions if it's a ball game, and no need to stock a bunch of ball transmissions if it's an arm game.

Just a thought.

And not a new one either. It really doesn't make sense that FIRST keeps all this on the low down until Kickoff, especially after all the friendly suggestions to open things up.

However, I don't know that this would alleviate the problem as much as we would like. There are a lot of teams that don't do a thing until Kickoff rolls around, so they would continue buying everything in the build season crunch.

As many have stated, the best thing to do is get your design done sooner rather than later so you're not in this situation, or so you have time to wait for lead times or to come up with a backup plan.

We ourselves are kind of behind where we would like to be in terms of design, but at the same time we have much more of the robot designed that we did on any of our past robots, at any point. We just have to deal with lead times and part shortages now... And we are fortunate enough to have come custom machining options to fall back on as well.