how messy

[papa smurf]

i was just wondering how messy did it get in the rooms in which you bulit you robots in and how often did you clean up?

our room was petty much a mess for 6 weeks while we built our robot. We did do some cleaning but when we did we didnt know where every thing was. I wanted to know if any team had the same problem or have similer stories to tell so i can prove to my team that we arent the only team like this.

[David Lantz]

The local utilities company donated space in one of their buildings for us to use and so far I don't recall ever seeing the place with out a giant mess inside. Even for our open house we had to move the playing field to another room to make sure that we didn't have to clean up our mess. However, I just think that clean people are people who are worried about lossing their stuff I know were all my stuff is, I'm not worried.

Working on a Duponts site means that our work area had to be atleast clean enough not to be dangerous to anyone walking in there. Thus, we cleaned often and in fact, if it wasn't clean before we left...guess who didn't eat until it was cleaned? Mmmhmm..you guessed it.

So, just to let ya know...I wouldn't eat off the floor cause that's...nasty...but it was clean enough to see the floor and all the tools were put away properly before we left for the night. I can tell you...it made things easier to find when we were looking for stuff.

[Yan Wang]

Heh, our school didn't give us a room. They aren't nice.

After we worked 3-4 hours each night in a tech room, we'd clean it up and go home... meaning it was neat neat neat everyday.

[Clark Gilbert]

We have a workshop in a warehouse that Cingery/PSI owns (electrical/power). To get it really really clean would take us forever, but if we work for about 1hr w/ about 10 people we can get it good enough where it's good enough to show off to the public. The worst part would have to be on the work tables and around the mills.

[Jeff Waegelin]

We have to clean up every day during the week, because we're in the school auto shop, but on the weekends, we just let it go, then clean it all up Sunday night. It can get pretty bad.

[narenr]

Our work room was hideous. We had tools everywhere, and only faked cleaning up every 3 weeks so we could see the floor. We actually did almost all of the work in the hallway, which we had to clean up every night. I think we spent more time looking for tools than working on the robot.

[Duke 13370]

We have to split a room with some staff in the garage at visteon, and every weeknight we had to clean it up.

The funny thing is, is that the staff left the room in a mess and we always get blamed for it, even when we could eat off the floors when we leave.

[Pin Man]

we had a small working area but we made the best of it... we cleaned as we went along and now it doesnt look that bad...

[pauluffel]

We were working in a donated room, and the teacher there was rather picky about their being no sign of our existence. She let us shove stuff in her closet, but if she saw anything in her room, she would let us know (she yelled at me for at least 15 minutes because she found an aluminum shaving on her floor). This means that every day we had to unpack all of our stuff from the closet, and then every night we"d have to shove everything back into a box and get it back into the closet some how....not fun...

[evulish]

Technically, I could have eaten of the floors every night we worked. Whether or not there'd be loads of screws, WD-40, aluminum shavings, wood chips, zip ties, grease, and random objects in the steak would be questionable. We had an incredibly messy shop. We had to clean it up most of the time since the middle-schoolers use it for their wood shop. We also have part of another room dedicated to robotics...that place is _always_ messy. If we clean it up then come back in a few days, stuff is moved...and there's only really one person over there! I think our robots come alive and move stuff.

No...seriously...

[RobDeCotiis]

we used our school's tech lab to build our bot.. worse than the messiness is when someone would clean up... when it was a disaster area, the builders knew where all the tools were.. "oh, the 1/4 20 tap is on the table over here, the 1/8" hex key i remember i sat it down on the drill press before,...."
then someone would clean and we'd be like "[expletive deleted], i left the [expletive deleted] tap on the table over there and someone moved it!" or "who took the 1/8" hex? i left it on the drill press, where the hell is it?!", only to find out that it's in our tool cart... :-/ looking for newly organized tools cost us hours of build time..

[Ed Crammond]

That photo makes your room look postively spotless compared to ours. And it didnt help that our room was also about 1/4 of the size.

We got to the stage where after being in the room for a couple of hours you became blind to the object that you would be looking for. Everything becomes a steel and plastic haze. You could be looking right at what you want to find, even pick it up and put it back down again, but you wouldnt realise what it is.

Tidying up was kind of sporadic, intending to minimise the "tool blindness" effect, but it never got much further than moving piles of stuff onto other piles of stuff.

[Marc P.]

Originally posted by RobDeCotiis
we used our school's tech lab to build our bot.. worse than the messiness is when someone would clean up... when it was a disaster area, the builders knew where all the tools were.. "oh, the 1/4 20 tap is on the table over here, the 1/8" hex key i remember i sat it down on the drill press before,...."
then someone would clean and we'd be like "[expletive deleted], i left the [expletive deleted] tap on the table over there and someone moved it!" or "who took the 1/8" hex? i left it on the drill press, where the hell is it?!", only to find out that it's in our tool cart... :-/ looking for newly organized tools cost us hours of build time..

Exactly the same with us. We try to maintain "orderly messiness," meaning it's a mess, but at least 85% of the student members know where everything is within the mess. Unfortunately, some of the adults don't agree with this philosophy, and clean up behind the student's backs. I lost count of the amount of time spent trying to find papers with schematics, dimensions, pinouts, software code, etc. when most students knew it should have been in a specific pile of stuff. The adults, of course, merely say "what? we were just trying to make the place look nice." Yeah, it may look nice, but it's impossible to find anything =P

[f22flyboy]

we work in an old hall that was closed off for storage. Unfortunately it is half full of empty cardboard boxes we are not allowed to touch or move, so our entire workplace is about 40'x15'. It was always a mess during build season, but we could usually find stuff because we remembered where we left it. Then, last week we had all the freshman and ppl who didn't do much work come in and put in at least an hour of cleaning so they could go to the competition. Our room got relatively "tidy" but on Friday when we went to pack up the tools for competition we couldn't find anything. So know all the freshman have to find the tools before they are allowed to go to competition.