Crazy Robot Inspection Stories

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by pathew100

This year, a mentor walked up to me (inspector) in the pits:

"The team next to us showed up and dropped off their robot and left. It's last year's robot. I remember because we helped them build it here at last year's event."

Sure enough, in their pit was a robot that had slick wheels and a trailer hitch on it....

And... last years bumpers. I remember seeing that this year too, one of 397's parents looked at it and got this confused look on their face.

2008 397 had problems with our launcher pushing our frame out of square. After 2 competitions where we were told that we didn't fit in the box (because the frame was off by 3 degrees) We walked to the inspection box with a hammer. Proud to say we it into the box quite well after a couple good whacks. (For anyone who didn't see that robot, its frame was made of bent 1" square tubing so it actually got unbent quite easily)

Speaking of weird looks, among the strangest looks I have ever gotten in FRC was when our forks in '08 got bent up. Ever see two people jumping on the robot to get the forks back in shape? Yup, it was fun. Turns out I don't weigh enough to do it though.