Machining in the pits at regionals

[Gary Dillard]

Anyone run into this one?.....

7.7.9 ...Grinding and tools that cause sparks are not allowed in the Pit, so teams must use the machine shop when repairs and fabrication may produce sparks.

Thursday at Central Florida Regional they made an announcement in the pits that you were not allowed to cut metal in the pits, all metal cutting and machining had to be done in the machine shop. The origin was reasonable enough - someone was grinding in the pits and sparks were flying so they made the announcement. I went to speak to the safety reps to clarify the announcement, and they said cutting "plywood or plastic" was OK, but not metal. They said that the interpretation they had received from FIRST for "tools that cause sparks" was any metal-on-metal fabrication, and they were trying to make things consistant across regionals.

After a long, spirited but friendly debate with them (as you can imagine) I told them I would contact FIRST about it since it seemed unreasonable. Thankfully this letter of the law wasn't enforced - they still allowed teams to use hacksaws, drills, files, we used our mill and lathe - so they weren't unreasonable about it, but I'm curious if anyone else has run into this? If it's a non issue I won't even bring it up to FIRST.

Can you imagine hauling your robot to the machine shop everytime you want to drill a hole in it or file off a sharp edge?