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I doubt precision is the cause of it, as my towers have been doing... bad to okay-ish, if I were an optimist. How are your towers doing? Feel free to ignore this question if you want. I know that many people don't like sharing the scores of their towers (me being one of them).

Mine have been decent at the last competition, but the one I just tested failed miserably. I think I got 26-28 (can't remember exactly) on my decent one..but I need to get better fast.

Yeah, competition is pretty tough, with some towers in the 30s and 40s.
Regarding joints, I think people are mostly using lap joints, since it stops the tower from splitting and it's easier to build.

So much easier to build! And I have a plan to get into the 40s but we'll see how it goes...doesn't have a bright future at the moment. Lap joints give you so much leeway too.

I'm assuming that your towers have been holding all the weight, as you have a score of 26-28. What is the average weight of your towers? Also, nice job with the 26-28, even if you think that's only "decent." A tower like that would have taken 1st in my region.

It actually held one cupful less than all the weight..so I think it was closer to 14kg. I think my tower was around 7.5 or something at regionals, and we got first. How did you do at regionals?

I had a huge failure that was even worse than usual. I believe I got around 16th place, which basically was the outlier of my teams overall performance.. Anyway, I built the tower terribly and it failed at 4kg, giving me a score of 3.4, which is why I don't like this method of scoring. Basically, the tower must hold everything or close to everything to place in the event.

Oo, I'm sorry. I hate when that happens.
And yeah, even though I didn't do towers previous years, it seems more reasonable for them to be scored the way they used to be scored. It's hard to even GET to 4 grams and having it hold the weight is harder, which almost makes it seem a heavier tower will win. And that kinda stinks if something unexpected happens too, which the old method did give more points for light towers.

Well, as the purpose of the new method of scoring was to put more emphasis on the weight it carries, rather than the weight of the tower, at least it's working..
Also, (this has strayed a bit from build techniques..), would you classify the design of your tower as more complex or simple? I have basically the dime-a-dozen, generic tower design (X's)

It is working for sure...although it does make the event a bit more different from previous times. Mine is pretty simple actually, X bracing throughout. It seems to work pretty well most of the time.