About being overweight and exceeding your size requirements – the need for reinspecti

[ChuckDickerson]

Originally Posted by Billfred

It could be.

Personally, I'm wondering just how bad it'd be if teams had to weigh in before each match. Just drop your robot on the scale, make weight, and pick it back up to go onto the field. Probably would take a second scale, though.

FWIW: I really question the calibration of the competition scales sometimes. Last year we weighed in during initial inspection at 19.4 so we added a short piece of 1" x 1/16" wall aluminum box tube just to add a little more protection for our RC. It brought our total weight to 119.8. We never added or subtracted anything else from our robot the entire competition. When we re-weighed in before eliminations the robot was 118.7. Somehow we magically lost over 1 lb. I just can't see how that could have been anything other than the calibration of the scale. The scale was moved from the original inspection area to the queuing area before the start of eliminations. Scales of this precision require extremely good calibration and don't like to be moved. I have also noticed that, believe it or not, how the robot is placed on a scale changes the reading. We have a fairly good scale here at work used by our shipping department. It is probably calibrated once or twice a year. Last year we weighed our robot on it and the weight varied as much as 5 lbs depending on how the robot was placed on the scale.