When to purchase competition kits

VEX IQ General Discussion
1

Hey yall. New coach here and we tested a single team this year. It went great and now we want more! I got some conflicting information from other coaches so figured I would ask:
When should I purchase additional competition upgrade kits? I have several classroom kits already but am unclear on if I can use the competition upgrade kit from this year for next years competition.

Any other recommended purchases for a new team?

Thanks!

2

The competition upgrade kits are just extra parts. You can buy them whenever. The game elements (i.e. Rapid Relay kit) kits come out every year and are different every year due to a new game, new season.

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3

If you have more than one team you might want to price out getting just the packs of parts vs buying the upgrade kits.

So far the only thing you can’t buy as “parts” are the 3x and 6x plates, the axel supports, and some connectors. I was able to build “Swish” this year out of my V1 parts, the advanced connector kit and the Rope and Pulley kit.

Welcome to the competition!

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4

I agree with this. I have two competition kits and everything else I have bought as the parts packages. Even the competition kits won’t give you enough 2x20’s to build the bigger bots students will want to start trying to build. I think I have 10 education kits and 2 competition upgrades, then everything else was a la carte.

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Oh I did not think of that, thanks! Any standard recommendations for what to get for a new team in that case? Possibly including storage if the parts packages don’t include that.

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My top list:

  1. The Pin Tool. This makes everything go faster for builds. Buy 2 for each team
  2. 1x beam kit - has everything from 1x1 to 1x20, includes all the odd sizes. I love 1x1 beams to lock parts in place.
  3. Standoff extenders
  4. Cap Pins - When my teams lock into a design and they think that the build is solid, they go back and do a rebuild with cap pins where possible,
  5. Motor shafts and Capped shafts -
  6. Corner beams
  7. Corner connector advanced kit
  8. Long beam pack (1x)
  9. Long beam pack (2x)
  10. Sprocket / chain and extra chain
  11. Enough omni wheels for each team to have 4

TBH I loved Slapshot and Full Volume, not for the game but for the huge amount of different parts. Colors rock!

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7

Hello, (I am a scholar and team lead for our competition team) as someone who likes to avoid most complications, as soon as the game is released, I order the competition kits to get started on the robot ASAP, for this years rapid relay, our robot of 2 years was destroyed 2 days before the competition and we were able to win 3rd place due to the alertness and the priority we need for this competition, so my team just orders the stuff way before the competition