The spread of pinching rollers this year

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Josh Fox

I find that somewhat interesting, because we had an 1/8" drop as well and received penalties as a result. We were told that as we accelerated and decelerated quickly our rock would lift the ball up ever so slightly during gameplay.

I'm not trying to imply the wrong calls were made on either of us, but that's ultimately the reason we removed our center drop and swapped out the rear plaction wheels for slick wheels for MSC on.

I harbor no ill feeling whatsoever towards any ref who may or may not have called incidental carrying penalties such as the ones we experienced, but I do feel that the way it was called at the Championship, i.e. you only received a penalty for carrying a ball an extended period of time, was more within the intent of the rule in my opinion.

It may have also come down to weight distribution. 397 had 1/8" drop and a pinching rollers. There was some concerns with us accelerating hard but because our weight was almost exclusively centered in the back of our robot we only rocked forward when we stopped fast. I don't know 1718's weight distribution but RUSH's looked like it was more centered on the middle wheel (I could be wrong this is just based on my memory of 27's robot) This would cause you to rock forward or backward.

Our pinching rollers were similar to 67's. We also stole the idea of tennis grip from 1718. (And the fact that one of our mentors is a tennis coach)

The only times we got a carrying penalty was when the ball was forcibly inserted into our frame. We had figured that the ball would not compress enough to do this... we were wrong. This was fixed with some steel cable running across the back of our intake. Never had a problem with that.