Teams: Check Your Bumpers

[topgun]

Originally Posted by Cal578

The minimum size of a bumper, as measured at the surface where the team number goes, is 11.25". It's not 8", as many people post. You have 8" of frame per [R27], plus 3/4 inches for the overlapped plywood (see figure 4-4 under [R28]), plus 2.5" for the noodle in the corner space per [R31]. Even if you use the vertical noodle as shown in the lower left of figure 4-6 and you don't want your team number to go into the rounded corner, you have 10.5 inches you can realistically work with.

You are assuming that people are overlapping with the shorter bumper. If the connection/overlap is coming from the adjacent bumper, then you only have 8 inches.

I agree with Adam about the bumpers.

Furthermore, the whole "at the ends" in R33 is going to be a bigger problem for teams than R35. We modified our bumpers to meet this "at the end" section in R33 following Saturday's pre-ship event and it resulted in more weakly mounted bumpers than what we had before we met the R33 compliance. This problem is especially acute for teams using the KOP chassis since there are so many bolts already in the corners of the chassis. Our nice pinning solution doesn't work at the ends.

An inordinate amount of time and money is spent on bumpers, when the focus should be on the main robot.