Is painting your team numbers on your bumper legal this year?
This year R408D says:
be covered with a rugged, smooth cloth. with no additional coating applied by the team (multiple layers of cloth and seams are permitted if needed to accommodate R405 and/or R406, provided the cross section in Figure 9-7 is not significantly altered).
In team update 0 the phrase “with no additional coating applied by the team” was added to this rule
It could be argued that paint is a coating material applied by teams and there is not an allowance made in this rule for team numbers. I believe that as the rule currently stands numbers on bumpers are currently only allowed to be made out of fabric or thread.
I’m also not sure about vinyl bumper numbers mainly because I’m not sure if vinyl would be considered a “rugged smooth cloth”.
I am going to guess that the intent is to prevent teams from appling grease or something similar to their bumpers but as written it currently also prevents some common methods of marking bumpers.
That does seem to be the most reasonable interpretation.
You could possibly argue that paint and vinyl numbers are not a ‘coating’, but the explicitly allowed cloth for R406 seems to refute this. You could also maybe argue that vinyl is ‘cloth’.
But I expect this rule will be updated or clarified in the future.
that might be a valid interpretation of the rule under its current wording but I doubt that FIRST would intend make bumper numbers that they outlined in their bumper guide illegal, I would expect that this rule is more about trying to prevent teams putting some kind of plastic coating on their bumpers to make them slicker
This rule update is attempt number 357-ish to clarify what kind of fabric is or is not allowed. In the past it was described as not having a coating, or of being only a single layer. This not only precluded fabrics like vinyl (which has multiple layers) but also anything with a factory waterproofing treatment, including, ironically, the 1000 denier Cordura recommended in the manual. It also used to make reversible bumpers illegal (due to the multiple layer thing).
The main reason this was ever an issue was that a small minority of teams once modified their fabric to increase either stickiness or slipperiness with things like Lemon Pledge furniture polish. In the era of the T-bone pin (pre-swerve revolution) this was somewhat advantageous. My own team has experimented with slicker (factory) fabrics on the sides and tackier fabrics on the front and back. 971 prominently used the allowable heat press vinyl numbers and FIRST logo to change the characteristics of their fabric at the intake side of their robot.
I feel bad for whoever has to re-write this rule for us all the time.