Anyone else crippled by no supply of parts?

[aka Scott White]

Well, this is my first post to the Chief Delphi board, and now I'm going to vent some serious pent-up frustration. This is my team's second year, and after our rookie year last year (When we had no support from any engineers, and made several bone-headed mistakes including wrapping an axle with electrical tape to make it fit, mounting casters instead of front wheels in a two wheel drive system, and not remembering to test the strength of our drive train while fully weighted down and drawing a lot of extra power from the battery that the rest of our systems required), we felt that we knew a lot more about how to build a decent robot. Well, we've got a design that looks pretty good now but we just recieved word that most of our drive system won't arrive until next thursday (assuming we actually get "next day" delivery). This wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't told us a week and a half ago that it would take 3 to 5 days for us to recieve the parts. We still haven't recieved the rest of our kit of parts from F.I.R.S.T. (retro-reflective tape and the light would be nice), and does anyone out there know where in the world you can find the mounting for this year's seat motors? Of course, as mentioned in many other threads already, Small Parts is basically out of parts, and now the various stores in our area are out of those same parts.

Well, if worst comes to worst, we still have our mock-up for this year and last year's stripped down frame (it can perfom great tricks like "roll," "play-dead," and my personal favorite, "tip-over")