Section 8.3.3 Illegal Gearboxes and Chassis

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

that is a tough spot to be in. I sympathize with you in the lack of funding, which is an issue for MANY teams in FIRST. However you must look at the situation as a whole. Whats the difference between purchasing the parts a few days early, or an entire year early? Why is it acceptable for low budget teams and not acceptable for teams that have signifigant funding? FIRST cant be run with double standards. I do not like the rule at all because I feel teams, like yourselves, do not order parts early as intent to build early, but simply to make sure they come at all. Hopefully FIRST will clarify some of these rules for us. Until then good luck with build season, I'm sure your team will come out with a quality robot regardless.

Brandon, perhaps you have not worked inside the wonderfully strangling red tape of a school system. If you had read the post, he noted that if they had waited to order them until during the build season, they would have arrived well after the build season. Ordering something as expensive as 2 AM trannies takes ATLEAST 4 weeks to make it through the procurement bureaucracy and get a check cut, and then the check still has to get to AM and the trannies have to get back to the team. Any team that is funded by a school or runs their funds through a school has to deal with this, so FIRST is basically telling these teams that they have to stick with the kitbot and whatever they can make on their own in whatever machine shop they may or may not have. In other words, FIRST is telling these teams to not even bother thinking about doing interesting things and taking on the harder engineering challenges.

FIRST says they want a team in every school funded by the states. If they're serious about that, they need to get their heads out of the clouds and look at how their policies and rules actually affect these minimally funded school teams. As it is, it seems they've drafted their rules to force teams to spend all their time hunting sponsors before they can do any actually interesting engineering.

At the very LEAST, FIRST could have warned teams, OFFICIALLY, that mechanisms bought preseason would be disallowed. Despite Dave being high up there, no one is going to take his vague warnings on CD as seriously as an Email Blast from FIRST. This wouldn't have affected the game a single bit and would've given time for debate and consideration prior to it becoming an actual issue.