Purchase/Prebuild - What's the difference?

[Bill Gold]

I’m second-guessing the effectiveness of my words, so I’ll try to clarify my original post.

My intent when quoting <R09> from this past year was to highlight the “individual off-the-shelf components” part. This rule wasn’t new in 2004, rule M1 in the section 4 (The Robot) PDF says the same thing with regard to off-the-shelf components, and although I don’t have one in front of me, I’m 90% sure that 2002 had a similar rule.

Using the most recent language (2004 manual), the company JoeBob should be treated exactly like any other corporation. So a transmission fabricated before the build period, as long as it was purchased from a company that made their products available to all teams, would be a legal component on your robot.

Andrew brought up the scenario of this company not being able to fill all orders, and thus preventing the components’ usage by teams whose orders were filled. I do not believe that this is a valid argument. If team X needed a 0.7M gear we would have to turn to PIC to obtain it (since they don’t have access to wire edm or a gear cutting machine). PIC usually has a 2-3 week lead time, but I’ve heard cases where teams haven’t gotten their gears until after the build period. Does this mean that Team A’s transmission that features a gear received from PIC is illegal to use because Team X didn’t get their part in time? I don’t think the answer is yes. I think it sucks for Team X that they will have to redesign their robot a little, but Team A shouldn’t be punished because their order was filled. I, personally, feel that any such company should be prepared for about 200 teams ordering their products.

Like Andrew said, this is going to cost a lot of money the way things are right now, and an even larger amount of money if FIRST changes the motors (as FIRST has done in the past with the FP motor, since it depends on the leftover stock at FP).

I really haven’t made up my mind on how I feel about this ready to use transmission purchasing. On one hand I think it’s a great idea, especially for teams how only have hacksaws, hand drills, and hammers. But like Dave and Raul said, I miss the good old days of everyone being forced to use the same catalog, or the same source. That made robots like CD 2000 and others so much more amazing, seeing what they did with the exact same catalog as I was looking at.

I'm not sure if I lost an additional $0.02 here, or if it was the same $0.02 as I spent earlier in the thread...