Unphayzed Vehicle Kit

[brian9640]

The Unphayzed vehicle kit has been showing up at some recent tournaments. Of the 4 Unphayzed vehicle kits at this past weekend tournament, 2 left broken. While this kit has the ability to perform well, the kit appears easy to break. The kit seems more intended to be handled by an adult and not middle school students. I would recommend any school using these kits to make sure their students using the kit are very careful. Running the vehicle at slower speeds then the advertised speeds could be safer.

[pumptato-cat]

I would recommend any school avoid vehicle kits altogether. You are essentially paying $120 for one vehicle. That's up to you to whether it's worth it or not, but I'd say it is definitely not a good price. That money is better spent funding other build events, or registering for competitions.
Aside from bad pricing, there are other issues with using a kit(unless it's a Flight kit-those are normally well designed and starting a flying event successfully is nearly impossible without one). Kits take away from the spirit of the event in my opinion--you learn much less by using a kit than by building from scratch. For example, why is the frame so long and wide? I don't know that many would know the answer to this question unless they understood the design behind the vehicle. That's not something you learn by copying kit designs. It is better to learn these concepts on your own. Also, the design is not optimized. Judging from pictures and others' experiences, there are many improvements that could be made, and the vehicle looks rather flimsy.
I will say, however, that starting off with a kit is not a bad idea--it's just not the most effective. For example, I started vehicle events with Doc Fizzix's MTV kit. It took me three years to realize that balsa is terrible for building car chassis. I did learn a lot from it, though, but the difference is that that kit left much more room for adjustment and experimentation...
If everyone uses this kit, vehicle events become a competition of who has the most money, and who can use a kit the best. Does anyone really want to attend a competition with 30 Unphayzed cars? I certainly don't.

[Shloke]

I can also agree with your claim. I have personally experienced failure with this kit. When I used it at the University of Austin Texas Invite this year, I found that the car has great difficulty transporting due to its massive size. Also, most of the 3d printed parts are quite finicky and break easily. His inspiration for the kit seems to come from the national 4th-place MTV. On top of that, I attempted to use the oscillation breaking mechanism which also doesn't work at the 10.5-11 meter distances due to there being not enough string or the rubber tubing snaps. Even with wingnut braking, the car always fills more flexibly, and if the trigger slips from overwinding, it will shatter the teeth of the trigger gear in an instant. I personally felt that all the times I was using the kit, it was going to break at any moment which always put me on edge. I feel that for the price of $120, it's not worth it. I feel that those who have just started the event with this kit will be prevented from realizing what greatness can be achieved with how open the rules are this year like how pumptato-cat was talking about. However, with all that being said, no one is going to stop anyone from using any kit in general. It's up to competitors to realize the shortcomings of such kits and who knows, maybe they can change it to perform well in an actual competition. The point is that this kit has a lot of great concepts that just weren't executed well. Hope my opinion helps!
-Shlok Singh
Sierra Vista Middle School