pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

What's the thickness of the 2x1?

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

It's 0.0625"
that's what I've heard a lot of good teams recommend for WCD, and this is a similar aplication.

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

I'd be a little scared of the 1/16th wall tube for your drive base. We used 1/8th last year, and we had a strong one piece bumper protecting it, and we managed to bend our front a little bit. I would imagine that the damage would have been a lot worse if we had thinner wall thickness.

That said, I doubt next year's game will involve so much ramming, so you might be able to get away with it.

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

Thanks for the advise. That's something that would have to be decided after the game is announced.
I think that this chassis would be fine in most games because the extrusions would have strong gussets, and a large belly pan to support them.

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

1/16" wall tubing is plenty strong enough as long as your bumpers are built correctly. The main reason elite teams use 1/8" for WCD's is because they need the strength for the bearing block slots.

973 used exclusively 1/16" 2"x1" 6061 tubing on "Emperor Swerve" and "Encore", which were both swerve drives back when the base was 28"x38".

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

Not really related to the design, which I think is awesome, but just out of curiosity, how long did this take to CAD? I also get in CADing moods and we've been planning on an octocanum drive train for this year and I've made countless versions of it and they usually take anywhere from 4-12 hours to hammer out all the details and assemble everything.

Re: pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis
 

Thanks!
Because this model was designed almost entirely from scratch, it took good 6-ish hours of CADing to get to the point shown in the picture. When I get a chance, I'll do some other versions of this design, and those designs shouldn't take as long as this one did.
It also helps that I have some experience designing swerves, and drive trains in general.