Weight Issues in Regionals

[bombadier337]

Just figured I'd post to see everyone else's weight problems at the first regional, and see if anyone's got us beat. When we were weighed at the DC Scrimmage, we were told we were around 102 lbs, WITH bumpers. We added a few sheets of lexan for protection, and shipped. Well, fast forward to practice day at VCU, we weigh 166, yes, 46 pounds overweight. I have been told by the inspectors we had the record for VCU this year. We had to take the gatherer completely off, as well as remove some protection, but we improved human loading so it worked out in the end. In all we manages to lose 57 pounds. Thursday was one of the hardest days I've ever had in FIRST, so I figured I'd see if anyone else has a good weight loss story (preferably at a 2006 competition). If this is a repeat, I'm sorry I didn't find the first. Post away!

[Conor Ryan]

We weighed in at 168 last year before we shipped, that was 48 pounds over so we might still have a record, there was a rumor that this year there was a team that weighed in at New Jersey 33 pounds over the limit, but 46 pounds over....yeah you can slim it.

[EricH]

Our first year (1998), we were about 20-odd pounds over on Thursday. Recently, we've been up to about 5 pounds over--which is still a lot.

[Rick TYler]

Heh. We planned for weight from the very beginning, which meant that when we came in three pounds over it was really hard to find something to remove. We ended up losing the camera and our rear ball-sweeper guard bar. To the people that made the decision, losing the camera was easy, but the loss of the guard bar meant that our ball sweeper was crushed in an early match. No major loss, since the ball sweeper (which worked) wasn't tied into the loading mechanism (which worked). Since the ball sweeper's only role was to toss Poof balls onto the electronics board, its demise mattered little.

[Rombus]

2 Stories from 1278:
in 2005 we really didnet have a good scale to weigh our robot, So we had this bad mentality of "We have X pounds to work with", we ended up being about 2 pounds over. This year, we had access to a much better scale, so we knew how much we had to work with, so again we had the mentality of " We have X pounds to work with" This year were overweight by about .8 pounds. i find it humorus that even with access to a better scale were still slightly over weight.

Now for the funnier story: We were weighing our robot before ship. Since the room with the scale is pretty small, only the mentors and the team captian came in to weigh, the rest of the team had to wait outside. we were discussing our slight overweight issue when someone came up with the bright idea to tell the team we were 50 pounds over. I decided to try it, I walked out with a look of pure disgust on my face and kept repeating to myself "What can we loose? what can we loose?" Trying to be as serious as possible. One of the build team members asked how much we were over. I looked him dead in the eye and said "50 pounds, i have no idea what we can loose to make weight" The room went dead silent, the look of "Oh Shoot" was on everyone faces. finally i couldnet take the pressure any longer and broke out laughing and explained how much we were over, and that the 50 pound statment was a joke. Most people found it pretty funny, but i did get a punch or two in the arm from some of the students!

[nuggetsyl]

in nj we noticed the scale was weird. by picking the robot up and putting it back down it would weigh less. Go figure????

shaun

[Beth Sweet]

During the Fix-It windows, my guys are going to be buying steel for our robot. I think they said that we need about 40-50 more lbs. So the entire thing is going to have chunks of steel. So much for it being pretty...

[Lil' Lavery]

Well, normally 116 is pretty close on weight, no more than a couple pounds over, but this year....
Ship date, we are weighing the robot 3 hours before it has to be crated to be sent away.
Weight: 142 lbs, and that is without our electronics board (but with our two side bumpers), so therefore we were about 147 pounds, 27 pounds overweight.
Scrap our conveyor system (which delivered balls to our shooter), scrap our turret, scrap our camera, reduce our superstructure weight, trim bolts, etc etc etc.
At competition we were 4 oz.s underweight

[Kims Robot]

1511 put its robot pieces on the scale on sunday morning before ship... and had to lose 20lbs while preping our pre-ship scrimmage!! We did it.. we lost 20lbs in 6 hours, without ANY loss of functionality... we cut we drilled, we hacksawed, we ground, we removed extra nuts and bolts... it was crazy... best crash diet I've ever seen... I only hope that our scale matches the one at the regional, cuz we are going to be close!!

[Dan Petrovic]

This year, before all of the lightweighting and stuff, I'd say, we were about 10-15 pounds over. We spent all day one day taking it apart and drilling endless holes in everything. We were still overweight when we got to the regional. In our first practice match, we tipped over and our Horizontal aiming was busted. That brought us underweight. The end effect: We can't score anything we shoot...

We are making some modifications for Nationals and we are converting our robot to a side scorer. This should give us 5-7 pounds of extra weight which will be added to the bottom of the chassis to lower our CG. Or maybe outriggers to aid in getting up the ramp.