How do you motivate yourself when you have to take off the intakes you took WEEKS to build? We really need some motivation!!! (Whether it’s a song or a meme or whatever)
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remove and disassemble intakes, try to score with robot, scoring doesn’t work because no intakes, now you want to make new intakes
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The intakes probably shouldn’t be taking 2 weeks to build, so that means you just need practice building. A great way to do that is building new intakes.
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Well, that was a little of an exaggeration, and our building doesn’t need work. Our intakes are very complex
So make less complex intakes. More motivation to rebuild.
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Dont focus on how good your old intakes were. Focus on how good your new intakes will be
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I get motivated by thinking about how much better the rebuilt robot will be than my current one
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step 1. get an un-builder on your team
step 2. sign up for a competition
step 3. expose the un-builder to robot*
step 4. wait till after the deadline
step 4. panick
Warning: unbuilder may unbuild too much
Alternatively
get a perfectionist builder
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Instead of thinking how not-fun it is to build, think of how not fun it will be to be in last place at the competition.
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Hold up here, rebuilding is really fun. The concept of working your butt off for 4 days in a row to create a competition ready robot from scratch and watching it work is the most satisfying feeling. We’ve gone through 5 prototypes, 7 intakes (3 of which are actuating intakes), and a gazillion rubber bands.
Oh, motivation? Simple. If you put in the work, the build, the program, the practice. You reap the reward of being good. Utilize that competitive streak, my friend.
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our teams motivation is that we have a competition coming up in about 3 days and we just pull LOTS OF ALL NIGHTERS . we get the work done because our programmer is constantly whining that he wont have time to make a solid auton
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Exactly, if you’ve set a definite goal with very high expectations, then if you really care about accomplishing that goal, then you will learn, build, suffer, and work anything you have to.
Ya grow that way. It builds character. Or at least that’s what my dad says… 
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Think about how nice your new intakes would be
What teams seem to overlook is modularity in both building and programming. They tend to build the robot in layers which means that each time there is a revision, a large amount of the assembly needs to be pulled apart. Even to a point where the team has to effectively start over.
A team that has a chassis as a complete subassembly and the intake as a separate subassembly, has more versatility. Design the robot so that separate systems can operate independently and have a standard footprint between the two so they can be easily separated. Now a team can pull the two apart and work on both at the same time. It also allows teams to design and build a different system, an intake for example, and replace and test it against the current one. If you are not happy with the replacement then you can switch it back.
The same with programming. Using functions and grouping them into sections based on the system they are supporting allows you to replace the intake section of code without interfering with the chassis code.
As you build your skills designing in a modular pattern you can then take it further with submodules. Again, replacing a small section of the robot, testing, and deciding if it works better than the previous version. Much easier to test, replace, maintain, and repair.
Could you imagine owning a car and having to take the whole thing apart whenever you needed to repair it? Using a modular pattern makes iterative improvements much easier and less stressful.
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the problem with building modularly is that for subsystems to work together in the best way, they often need to be closely interlocked, meaning that by making your build modular, you often sacrifice performance.
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Motivation you say… I like to think about how our intakes broke in state… and then everything works out perfectly 
Most vex robots are already modular tbh. Think about it: if you unscrew your magazine from the chassis, can you pull it off in one piece. Probably. If you remove your intakes, do they stay in one piece. Most likely yes.
in some cases yes, it happens to be built that way. but you should never sacrifice performance for modularity.
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I would agree with you somewhat on performance being a priority but I have watched many teams build robots for many years and often modularity, or even serviceability, is rarely considered. Taking some time to investigate this when designing can make things easier on future revisions.
It really doesn’t make much difference to me how a team designs their robot but having to frequently rebuild from scratch instead of making iterative improvements can hinder a team’s motivation. Responding to the OP.
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One thing that worked well for me this year was making something simple and solid in CAD, and once I built it the only things wrong could always be fixed by tuning and the movement of small parts. This way you can balance the benefits of modularity and of having your subsystems close together for performance.
Bottom line is, big problems should probably always be ironed out in CAD first.
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