Have done this too, forgot to save, lost everything
in 7th grade at one competition two cortexes caught on fire before we realized there was a short in the wire going to the motor controller right as it came out of the cortex
Loaded a cone upside down on skyrise
Many things:
- Looking down the front of the flywheel and testing the intake with the flywheel on (shot point blank)
- Using the wrong rubber bands on the catapult at regionals
- Make a double reverse 4-bar without bearings, ya, a few 45 degree shafts
Ahahaha I’m dying
How was that even possible to do without noticing?
Didn’t it used to be something like you had to move out of your starting square?
Changing the robot design AT the competition
@juliagillis I’ve often had that work out quite well.
During my first year of Vex I built (along with 3 others who thought this was a good idea was well) a scissor lift made of strapping. It ran on linear slides, which, needless to say jammed every time the scissor lift even slightly tilted. But because it was made of strapping “slightly tilted” was quite permanent. This was in Sack Attack.
And somehow this year I forgot to properly secure our flywheels compression plate, so our accuracy was absolutely all over the place. 
Edit: Scoring a cube for the wrong alliance last year, which also jammed our lift (Actually it was the button on the joystick, one of those rare moments where smacking something makes it work)
Last year, my team decided it would be a good idea to make an arm with the racks and pinion in hopes to be able to stack our our Skyrise sections very high. It didn’t work so well, so we decided maybe it needed rubber bands to hold it together and help. So we added some rubber bands. And then some more. And then some more. Eventually, our robot looked like a rubber band ball
Another situation occured recently whenever I let 3921C lift my robot with his ‘prototype lift’. His lift tossed my robot and I tried to catch it. Moments before we had cut some metal and I hadn’t sanded it down yet, which meant it was still really sharp. Thus, I now have a nasty scar across two of my fingers 
In Skyrise I was working on our lift (still not entirely sure what to call it) and I had just built the frame of it. There were no motors on it so I was lifting it by hand. Our field is elevated and in the first floor of my house, so the ceiling isn’t super high above the field, and there was a fan running above me… I lifted the lift, it hit the fan, and the lift flew backwards and hit me between the eyes leaving a nice scar :(… The lift was made of thin steel c channels… You know those two short bends on either side that run along the whole thing? Yeah, I bent one of those down with my face…
Setting up the field with a net directly in front of my desk. Head shot…head shot…head shot…broken glasses. Thanks Noah!
Well I have about three
- thought a claw bot was good for skyrise (It was my first week of vex)
- built a multi-bar lift that had so much tension we had to run the motors to lower it.
- had my robot fall off the field at worlds and then the pneumatics fired grabbing the ref.
Dumbest thing I did this year is that I suggested drilling a hole into a low strength axle to “further secure” the small screw in the shaft collar. Thankfully, the other mentor that I was working with and the wood shop teacher stopped me before I accidentally spliced an axle by drilling into it.
First of all do you have a video of that or now what match it was and in what division because I want to see that. And I don’t see what is wrong with a lift where you have to run your motors to bring it down.
If the spacing is tight enough on the lift axles, it will not go down under it’s own weight
Stupidest thing we did was our first year. I didn’t get the point of doing them since we wouldn’t get enough skills scores to win. It wasn’t until the last tournament of the season that I learned about the worldwide skills database. It was after the last tournament that I discovered that a team could qualify for states through skills AND that would have had enough points to have qualified if we had done the ^%&$*#(( skills challenges.
Believe me, I did not make the same mistake this year. I took the skills challenges very seriously. And it was a good thing because both of our teams qualified for worlds through their skills scores because of double qualifications in our state chamionship.
That’s what I am saying I don’t get why that is a bad thing.