Posted by Raul at 1/7/2001 1:54 PM EST
Engineer on team #111, Wildstang, from Rolling Meadows & Wheeling HS and Motorola.
Is it too much to ask to get blueprints with dimensions for all the parts? FIRST is all bout engineering right. If I took these field blueprints to any contractor and asked them to bid on the job of making the field, they would laugh at me. ALL the dimensions should be well defined so we can build the field correctly.
If it wasn’t critical to balance the bridge, then we would just wing it as we do every year. As it is, we need to do experiments with the bridge to figure out the possible ways to make it balance. But how do we do this if we do not know the proper distance to space the steel angles at the bottom of the bridge?
And how about the spacing of the flanges that hold the vertical PVC pipes on the goal? Why are we forced to figure it out from the lengths of the little horizontal segments and pipe joints? And when you glue it together, should we at least have a reference dimension to tell us if it was assembled properly? How do we know if we made it too big when gluing it together?
I sure hope they come out with an updated drawing with a lot more dimensions.
Raul