pic: Wooden Thunder, Team 1294

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by elknise

Why did you make your robot smaller to accomodate bumpers? Acording to R30 in 5.3.4 The Robot, Bumpers may extend outside the normal robot starting dimensions (in the horizontal plane) up to 4.” per side.

My bad. "Bumpers" in FIRST land are allowed to extend past the maximum size, but they have to be soft and removable for weighing and measuring. We were somewhat concerned about 130+ pound robots moving at 15fps smashing into our nice aluminum side rails, so we gave up the "free" soft bumpers in exchange for solid support for the rails.

This paid off in the Bellevue trial event when one of our own teammates smashed into our side. There is a 1/4-inch chunk missing from the side beam, but no damage was done to anything else.