Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

so now that the season ends in a week today most teams are done or almost done with their robots. i am wondering who is going to be drilling holes ... aka swiss cheesing .. their robots this year.

i know we will be for sure!!

--
ps - i did do a search on this so if there is already a thread on this im sorry .. i must have missed it

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

We find that using a drill to cut weight is not easy--it takes houndreds of holes in sheet to make a difference-unless it's small to begin with, you use a holesaw, or it's thick stuff (but then the whole thing is too heavy anyway). We used a saber saw to cut large triangles out of the drive plates- saving about a pound per plate. Our wings are similarly cut. We are now in the 120-125 range, so we are glad we did.

Many of you may have seen "wrench man", 449's logo. We have "person" made out of ~1" head wrenches, that weighs about 5 lbs. We hope to be able to add him to our robot (but only if we dont add any other weight for systems).
We did this last year, when a problem led to us re-designing the frame at houston. We weighed in
at:

http://www.manisbutareed.org/USFIRST2003/Houston/p4110029r.html

untill we had more time to add systems back.
Here is a team member w/buttons that have wrench man on them, arranged in the wrenchman shape:


http://www.manisbutareed.org/USFIRST2003/Houston/p4110005r.html

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

We are still under the weight limit currently but we are resorting to "speed holing" our robot rather than swiss cheesing it in order to add another mechanism. No important structural components will be drilled only pieces that are easily replaceable and do not harm the structural integrity of the robot or the drive train. I like speed holes........doesnt slow the robot down so much..lol

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Amusing calculation from last year:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...94&postcount=2

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

unfortunatly.....yes we are




edited to say: btw we are going to have a guess the number of holes contest at the cleveland regional. so you can get a head start i guess......

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Why is it unfortunate to drill holes to cut weight? We plan for lightening holes. There's no shame in it. The weight drop is significant, when you are toying with 130 lbs.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Is that for 1/4in whole in 1/8 Al plate or what? But that is funny

RIght now with the current setup our robot will be holier than the Vatican City full to the brim with Popes. But if we gop with the elementry version we should be fine :rolleyes:

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

The "3/4" DRILL Diet" usually will shave 5 to 8 lbs off our bots.

Just enough to make the "weight in" or components must be removed.
:ahh:
:D

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Yes, but only where no one could see them. like in the sprockets. only because our robot is going to be the best looking robot in the competition this year.
on a more personal note, i like to see holes in robots because they make them look more of an "unprofessionally" designed robot and you know that they did experience the weight issue that most every team deals with. :)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

I think most teams with engineer-support drill speed holes, too.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

we ended up not drilling individual holes, but more taking out big ovals and lost 10 pounds !!!

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

we lost 4 wheel drive (went to 2) and drilled like crazy

lost over 30 pounds

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Our team never seems to really be sure until the day before. It's so much more exiting anyway...

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Our team found a new way of taking weight off ....

Drilling holes in the battery could make the weight difference :D

One of our team members accidentally drilled up into the bottom of a battery when he was mounting line following sensors on the bottom, luckily it didnt penetrate the battery all the way, so it was a simple silicone fix.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Well, I would recommend getting a replacement battery if you're using silicone to keep it form leaking, that's just not safe.

Anyway, my team decided to do swiss cheese form the beginning. We don't have a lot of weight issues this year, since we went with aluminum plates instead of extrusion this year (big difference in accessability and weight). Besides that, the only thing we cut down on weight is our towers for the elevators. As soon as we got those, we slapped them on the mill and designed out weight reduction (patterns, and our team number and school name). All in all, it was more succesful this year then previous ones when it comes to weight.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Our team reduced weight by removing all comments from code and deleting the 1s from the HEX file. After all, the 0s are just a lot of nothing and comments are completly worthless. ;)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

we dont drill no stinking holes in our robot

we poke them through with a pick-axe!

BTW, if you need to save about 5 pounds, have your robot weighed with a dead battery - you'd be amazed how much those trillions of tiny electrons weigh!

EDIT: oh I just remembered - they make you turn your bot on when its weighed, to make sure you are not using a dead battery :o

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

You do have something with that last year we had one battery we bought weighed almost a pound less then the one in the kit.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

(shhhhhh! thats cause you live in Canada and they figure they can send you defective batteries and you wont bother to weight them in kilograms and convert it to pounds to see if you got everything you paid for!

its a huge problem! :^)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

haha
1.) i would give Canadians much more credit then u just did
2.) we happen to be a team from Windsor Connecticut USA

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Our scale only goes up to 25 lbs. We weighed our bot at a scrimage yesterday and it weighed 126 lbs. 40 lbs had been added in the previous 48 hours before that (we went build crazy, adding a second deck that folds out and an arm that looks more like a scorpion's tail than anything else.) We had to change some pneumatic stuff today, and we would have gone over weight. So we made the second deck and tail look like the muzzle of an automatic rifle ^_^

Before we ship it out, I want to count the amount of zipties that are in used on our Bot. I think I'll count weight-holes too. I can't belive we have more holes than zipties . . .

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

We have a 3 inch hole saw. Bye bye weight.

Unfortunatly we are at 130 lbs right now, but we still have to add our claw. This will probably entail removing our wings (which weren't really going to work, anyway)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

last year we wieghed 80lbs!!! to bad this year we are 130-135ish.

can you add decorations after you wiegh in??

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

any weight added by decorations must make you still under weight after you weigh every thing together needs to be under 130 :( it sucks we wont get to paint our arm and other things no room for weight

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

our robot needs to go on SERIOUS diet... of course we have to take the weight off somehow... but lets finish building it first...

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

we built light this year.... and it payed off
no swiss cheese nessesary... yet.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Thanks, Jeff. Let the whole world know that I, the Great DANE, has screwed into the plastic casing of the battery. Whoopee.

It was late. It was crunch time. I was tired, and didn't look where I was going. Too late. I hit the plastic and watched the drill bit sieze. I pulled it out straight away and realized what I had done.
By the by, it is perfectly safe to use a breached battery. That's a gel-cel, and gel-cels don't leak. Furthermore, I only hit the first outer shell. In the end, it was one of our most-used batteries, and no hiccups came from it, but it didn't stop my teammates from using it as cannon fodder to pin everything and anything on me. Being the team scapegoat is okay, if you can take the wrath.

Sparks

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

It's funny that this topic came back to the top of the pile of threads, since today was the day that I finally asked 303 what the holey metal they used on their robot this year that is pictured HERE.
It was premade sheet metal BTW, from HERE.

That's a nice piece of swiss.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Team 469 isn't planning to drill holes, but we expect to.

"Is there anything critical behind there? Is this a high stress part?"
"No."
"Drill it."

Of course, there are those little things before build season we do to lighten the robot. In case you didn't notice, the sideplates on our robot in 2004 were milled on the back. At a glance, they appeared to be solid 1/4" aluminum plate. And then there's the rest of the robot, which was hastily swiss-cheesed...