Yea my bad. The point of the post was to clarify that the vertical pool noodle isn’t part of a standard bumper by definition, therefore the vertical pool noodle should not be used in the 6" minimum dimension. I’ve thought about this several times due to the fact that our team this year is going with an open-front design and due to the nature of the bumper rules we unfortunately cannot have bumpers on the front, at all.
Heres a quick question:
What if one were to put bumpers on their robot in such a way that they fit all regulations and made contact within the bumper zone, but also extended below the 2.5" mark??
If it was below 2.5" it would not fit regulations.
Here is something to keep in mind for mounting bumpers in general, but especially on shorter bots:
Make sure that your standard bumpers can simply and securely attach to your chassis in the bumper zone with reasonably sized fasteners. Incorporate the bumpers into your design, don’t wait till the last minute to to find a way to attach them.
As an inspector last year, I saw 1 or 2 teams that needed some sort of metal bracket to fit the bumpers in the right place vertically. The teams thought these brackets would be counted in the weight of the bumper, but the brackets are part of the chassis and counted against the weight (and size) of the robot. Many other teams simply mounted the bumpers several inches outside of the bumper zone (between 2.5" and 8.5") because that was where it fit easily on their chassis.
With bumper requirement this year many teams will be building them for the first time. Don’t make bumpers an afterthought because unlike last year you can’t just take them off if they don’t meet requirements.
Our design calls for bumpers around the entire perimeter of a rectangular shaped robot and our design is such that the bumpers could be constructed (fastened together) as a single assembly with with either an overlap of the plywood in the corners and/or an angle bracket behind the plywood in the corners. If we did an overlap of the plywood in the corners would be be violating the no hard part of the bumpers may extend into the corners rule? If we rounded the outside corner of the plywood overlap so that no hard part of the bumper extends more than one inch beyond the robot frame would we be violating the rule? If we left the plywood completely out of the corners and fastened the segments together with an L bracket from behind would we be violating the rule?