I was wondering if anyone knew what happened to the destroyed disks during the competition season. I am specifically looking for one from the Midwest Regional
I’m not sure where they are right now, but the field supervisors and FTAs at each regional marked them with the regional and a “do not use” warning, then sent them along to the next regional.
I’m guessing that FIRST wanted to look at the discs to see what the damage was, make some guesses at how they got damaged, etc. so they could use that data in future years.
I recall in Las Vegas, the FTA was giving away the “do not use” disks to teams.
Team 694 accidentally melted a disk at the Hartford regional. They let us keep it.
…how?
Okay… our robot has two shooter wheels. During that match, one of the shooter wheels was broken. The disk was pushed into the shooter but jammed up because the wheel’s gearbox was jammed. The disk, however, remained in contact with the working shooter wheel and both the wheel and the disk were melted from friction. We have the disk pinned to our wall.
Cool. You have any pics?
We melted about a dozed disks during our testing. We continued using them as we figured that they would continue to be used at competitions.
We did manage to destroy one disk at Midwest, and they took it out of play. I’m not sure where it ended up though.
We have similar shooter. We had two sets of wheels that create a v-groove that holds the Frisbee really well. During the beginning of Friday matches we were having issues with our jags that controlled the shooter. So during autonomous and half of the driver controlled period one set of wheels was running at full speed with a Frisbee stuck rubbing against it.
Ah, yes, a very distinctive smell, the melting of discs. We got a fresh box of them late in the season, put them in the robot, and of course one got stuck, before it even got shot out once! It was an ugly tableau…
I had several FTAs show me damaged disk and sent me to the team to ask them to correct the problem. Some events had more disks mangled than others.
That surprises me. The mandate from FIRST was to send forward all disks even damaged ones.
Did anyone else interpret this to mean that the OP was looking for one particular damaged disk? …Maybe I should stop reading the “missed connections” classifieds 
I agree, I believe he is. The answer to that should be “at FIRST headquarters.”
Las Vegas was a week 6 Regional. My guess is that the field was headed back to Manchester and Manchester didn’t want any broken discs.
Seemed like only a few were handed out and the vast majority were boxed up. I recall the disks I handled on the field were in pretty good condition, maybe being a week 6 event had most shooters dialed in.
True, it may be by that point the discs were not as badly chewed and FIRST was ok with giving them out.
It was made very clear to us in Field Supervisor training that we were under no circumstances allowed to give any discs away. They were to be sent to their next destination and most likely were to end up back in Manchester.
Well I did think much of it but all I can recall was a couple discs being handed to a few students. Perhaps the student were just looking at mangled discs and gave them back.
Edit: Actually someone who volunteered at LV would be a better source than me. At the time of day I saw this, I was thinking more about the steakhouse I was going to eat at.
I can confirm that we have at least one disc from LV, they were being offered to take home.
Not sure if it falls in the “do not use” category or not. It’s used, but no more banged up then our practice discs.
Speaking of which, time to hit up Andy Mark and order a fresh set of practice discs for the off season…