Have you ever had flames on your robot? (Real or graphical?)

[Elgin Clock]

For quite some time now, Team 237 has had flames on many of it's robots.
Whether it is a vinyl flame, or this year a cnc'ed flame in the actual side plates themselves, we have had good luck with robots with flames made on them.

Do you put flames on your bot?

[Mike]

Hopefully this year our flames will only be graphics

[greencactus3]

well our last robot just had a piece of printed out paper with flames on glued on to our frame. it had our team number on it. aaand for flames.... well lotsa smoke but maybe there were flames. im not sure. it was a kinduv sealed place (electrical box) it mightve just smothered itself. but, it did smoke pretty bad

[Koko Ed]

uhhhh...yep.

X-Cats 2003.
X-tinguisher.

[Dorienne]

Haha come on guys, our team is best known for our flames!!!
Our robot was named Firestorm for 4 years, and this year we even had flames on it. =D
I'll post pictures later on. =)

[Pat McCarthy]

Must you ask?
The HOT Team has had flames since 1997(rookie year) but not in 1998. They were all graphical vinyl flames, although, we made flames as spokes in 2002 in our wheels and we've also made flames carved out of lexan.

Flames are our thing.

[MOEmaniac]

Yup, we had flames on our robot this year

[Wetzel]

I've only seen one robot with real flames on it, and that was at Annapolis two years ago. The fire extinguisher they have at events is not for decoration only.


Wetzel

[Mike Schroeder]

it used to be that 25's robots had flames on it, as a matter of fact when our robot entered the feild back in the day the officalls would reach behind a table and each grab a fire extinguisher.... just in the not so off chance our robot would burst into flames and the wheels would fall off...in the same match

[Cory]

Team 691 "Hartburn" (Hahaha, get it? ) caught fire at the 2002(?) SoCal Regional.

[thoughtful]

As a matter of fact we had real flames on the robot, its actually an interesting story. Last year we were all testing the robot at around 10:00 pm at night, i was driving the robot, we started smelling something funny, but discarded the smell as motors heating up. Any ways after abotu 10 second we saw flames, but some fast thinking member who were standing near the bot turned the break off, it was a faulty vector, no damage to anyother components was done, and now we often joke about it. Now we check all our components on a test board first.

[Heretic121]

Team 121's bot in Arch - seminfinal match 1.1 our bot was *im not sure if it sparked* but it definatley had heavy smoke which you could smell for the complete other side of the field =/

also i belive the side flaps of the 2003 bot had flames

[Hunter]

Our robot sort of had real flames on it last year (more of an explosion). We hooked up the current sensors supplied in the kit last year, and because of the intense heat required to get a connection on them, it melted the shielding on our pwm cable that attached to it. This caused a short across the polartiy sensitive capacitor and it created an awsome explosion in our electronics compartment. It turned everything down there black and we had to wipe it off, this was the first time we turned on our robot and it scared us to death, until we looked inside and saw that it didn't really do much serious damage (we ended up not using the current sensors).

[OZ_341]

Yes! 3 out of 5 years we have had flames on our bot. You can see pictures of our 5 bots here.

http://www.team341.com/robots.html (I don't want to clog CD with excess pics.)

We have also had flames off of our bot. Like the time a team member hooked a battery directly to a speed controller to test it (pooof!!)

And last summer when a spare hanging cable wire fell across 2 battery leads. This created a beautiful blue flame! (pooof again!!)

[Adam Krajewski]

We (857) had some real flames on our robot back in 2002 while on in competition at the West Michigan Regional.

A non-electrical mentor put one of our old batteries (which I don't even know why we had it with us) on the robot without anyone noticing. He also installed it upside-down AND neglected to strap it down.

We hit a robot during the match, the battery popped up, and both contacts hit our aluminum chassis. The little electrical tape that was dangling from the connector caught on fire with dramatic foot-tall flames. Luckily, vinyl electrical tape doesn't burn well, and the flames quickly went out without the need of a fire extinguisher. The robot was disabled by the field judges out of concern over safety, but once back to the pit we found the damage was minimal (just a little soot).

I realized what happened, took off the battery and was shocked to see that the THREADS of the bolts holding the battery cables to the terminals were MELTED. I cut off the battery cables so that mistake couldn't be made again.