Weight Watching
 

Just wondering how everyone is doing with weight constraints. We are actually 8lbs underweight right now, which we can not believe. We are right around 112.

Re: Weight Watching
 

Oops, we have a problem! 12lbs must disappear...

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Well, due to time running out we ditched our ramps giving us 40-45 pounds to play with. So we are about 43 pounds underweight last time I checked.

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unfortunatly we are about 8lbs over. we need to do some serious cheeseholing in the already cheeseholded components

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last check (with everything we could think of sitting on the scale with the bot), was about 105

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We weighed in only a few pounds overweight but we can...we think that we can easily get it under before ship date arrives.

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if you need a few pounds of leverage and cant bring yourself to make your frame any hole-ier try switching nuts and bolts to aluminum or sacrifice some bracing.
-adela

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We're 6 pounds over, with some serious speed holes to put in...

It's such a fun process, weight reduction, isn't it? :rolleyes:

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15 under... where are those lead weights at???? :D

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Agreed, bring on the lead!

20 lbs under as of earlier this week. (9.072 kg for you international folks to compare to)
That was before guards and stuff for electronics of course.

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we are about, oh 30 lbs over, were a rookie team and I am excited to drill some holes!:D

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Last I heard, we were a pound or so over. We still have room to take out weight though.

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Wow, that is a lot of weight to pull out with holes.
Just speaking from my past experience, you may want to think about pulling some assemblies or full components off. Unless you have a lot of solid blocks of aluminum that you can mill out, 30 lbs is a really hard target to reach with just cheese holes.

Best of luck though!

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Currently our current chassis and weight estimations for parts not on the robot are putting us around 123-4 lbs total. For a 120 lbs robot. We haven't done any cheeseholing yet and so i feel confident we can lose the weight. Good luck everyone with your weight issues (or lack there of)

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Well, our chassis is currently over 70 pounds. We're taking the entire robot apart and reassembling it in the next 3 days. Please wish us luck, we're gonna need a little miracle here...

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hey im on team 1124 and we are 10 pounds over weight but our problem is unlike other years we built with weight in mind so it is as light as it can be, so we dont kno where we are gonna get the weight but we will find a way ( sawzalls are our friends )

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surprisingly we are extremely UNDERWEIGHT lets say barley hitting the 110 mark were going for 120

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97.5 lbs., with two possible hands. Still need to get up around 110. Bring on the lead!

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We weighed in a little while ago and we were at around 90lbs with battery!:D So we have about 35 or so pounds to play with!

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We are at 120lbs, so we need to diet till we get to 110:yikes:

How many lbs can be taken of by speed holing (drilling holes in the frame), and is there any other methods of weight reduction?

Thanks,

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Team 1523 checked tonight and we were within a pound or two over 120. But, another spike, wire, motor, some chain and sprockets need to be added yet! Break out the hole saws! It's going to be a loooong weekend.:ahh:

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Do the math....aluiminum weighs 1/10th of a pound per cubic inch.

Plastic weighs about half as much.

Steel weighs almost 3 times as much as aluminum.

Little holes will not lose you much weight. Holes in thin material will not lose you much weight. Holes in plastic will not lose you much weight.

Removing excess bolts will help. Replacing bolts with a smaller size will help. Replacing steel sprockets with aluminum, or turning down the hub diameter, will help a lot.

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Dawgma 1712 is fully assembled and operation able, however we are WAY over weight :eek: . I'm talking 16 oz. people.:rolleyes:

Yes it's true, 16 oz. = 1 lb. :D

Our scale is registering at 120.5, but it is up to a half pound off so we're gonna take off 1 lb. instead of a half, just to be safe.

Good luck to everyone and see you at Philly and The Championship.

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Depending on how much our ramps end up weighing...we're flirting with 110, which is what we're aiming for. It's going to be tight.

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going for 120--last estimate I saw was 116. Changes have been made, however, and we were not entering the covering for our ramps. I have no idea where we are currently (other than that we are where we are supposed to be).

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Good luck to you and your reassembling :)

We weighed ourselves about a week ago, and estimated for the final components and lexan that we were putting on, and came in at 118.9 lbs. Today, we weighed in at 130.9. 10.9 magical pounds apparently - luckily, we hadn't cut anything weight wise yet so we're currently cheesing things like crazy and reducing some quarter inch lexan to 1/8th or even 1/16th.

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Yesterday we weighed all of our components and found ourselves 17lbs overweight. We have gotten rid of some of the weight but we will probably remove one of our ramps.

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yesterday team 41 left wieghing 118.7 lbs withought alumalite(or not so light) and half of the pneumatics. Today we left with the robot basically finished weighing 114.8lbs. not a hole was cut.

yay replacing 80/20 with 1/8 inch angle!!!

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My team is just on the edge of being over and under. were at 119.8:cool:

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we are barely "scraping by" :o119.8/120:o after cutting screens and the trimming the arm. i kind of feel bad beacuse our robot was made to be morbidly obese:(

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Ours was 11 pounds over. We had to get rid of two drive train motors. It was a tough decision. But now we are .2 under!!!! I think that the weight and height requirements are some of the hardest things to go by.:)

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we are in the 110 weight class, weighing in at 108. For all you guys under by only a few tenths of a pound, man id be careful with that, robots tend to gain weight in the crate and you don't want the last minute weight reduction craze
to commence.

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Our robot is 10 pounds over weight. Does anyone have any tips on how to make it lighter. THANKS

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If you could post a picture or two of your robot, we could give you some specific advice.

1726 has some experience with weight reduction at the 3 days to ship point (ie today), last year the robot was about 25 lbs over, all shed by Tuesday.

This year it's 1.5 lbs under at the 3 day mark.

(oops, it's really less than a pound under! it's a 5 footer)

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Our robot is right around 120....we haven't found a real good way of weighing it yet besides putting some wood on a normal digital scale and then placing the robot on that....any good advice. Another problem is that our chassi is made of steel......it's a little thinner becuase it's stronger than aluminum but it's still heavy.....too late to worry about that. We got it made for free so we aren't complaining. I'm gonna post some pictures on here sometime before 7 tonight so maybe you guys could check back around then and leave some advice for weight cutting. If you want to check out a few pictures now.....go here http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=64023 ....but i will still put better pictures up later. By the way....we changed the mechanism that knocks the ball off the starting place to PVC instead of stell.....cut a bit of weight that way.

Thanks and don't forget to check back around 7

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We cut holes before hand so that this wouldn't happen, and we have approx. 835 holes pre cut to make sure didn't happen, now we are at 95 lbs, with two different ball handling devices.

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We are about 10 lbs underweight, but we are still incomplete, and when we are we will be cutting things extremely close.

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During practice sessions yesterday at the Fembots Gym, we weighed in with bumpers on at 114.2 Lbs

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surprizingly i think our team is under the weight rule. awesome for us. if you have a problem with weight, look for things that can be replace with something that has less weight. we originally had some wood (how weird) but we switched to plexiglass...saved us alot of weight.

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We thought we were under weight, using the balance-on-wood-on-bathroom-scale trick. Then we went to the mentor's shipping scale, and were at 122. Drilling and cutting commenced. We'll get there - we were done, but now parts are strewn about for lightening, so pictures will have to wait.

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We are at about 115-120, we know what we're taking off if we need to shed some poundage though.

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Whew . . .

I sure hope our scale is calibrated properly. :ahh:

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At least your'e not cutting it close...last year our scale showed 19.9 when we put it in the crate!

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That's not cutting it close! You must have had a frame of unobtanium!

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We weighed in at 120.0 Saturday on what we believe to be a reliable scale. *crosses fingers*

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well we're at 132 nothing is cheesed yet so we should be fine

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We were at 104 last weigh in Friday night.
A few odds and ends left but this should be fine.

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We weighed in for the first time last night - 114.5 lbs! We just have a few more things to add tonight, but we don't expect those to be more than 2-3 lbs.

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We have been flirting with 120 for the last week or so. We are trying to save weight without compromising function (no removing a pneumatic tank, drilling holes in parts that need lots of strength, etc) so it has been slow going. So slow, in fact, that we are losing weight at about the same rate that we gain it from additional parts. I think we've lost about 3.5 pounds recently... 2 of which came from replacing our nice spring-loaded chain tensioners that weighed about 1lb each with lighter, manually adjusted tensioners, which weigh about 5-7oz. We also have a lot of 1/4-20 bolts on our robot that could be replaced with 1/4" rivets to save a load of weight, but nobody on the team has a rivet gun that do 1/4" rivets :( . I think we'll just barely make it under, but if worse comes to worse, we can remove an air tank.

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We weighed in at 126lbs with the bumpers and battery. Were thinking it's about 106lbs without the bumpers and battery.

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We need a way to reduce weight on our robot but keep it from its structure failing. We have two Hexagonal Shapes on arms controlled by Pnumatics. On a lift of 80 200s on our sexy chasis. We already made the Hexagons SWISS CHEESE and the arms. We need teh help please!

Thanks,
Anon-Kun, 1510

/EDIT/. The arms and hexagons need STRUCTURE.

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Like most years, we are nervous about our robot's pre-ship weight.

Our school teaches aircraft maintenance technology, so we have a calibrated (?) scale that is rated for 2000 lb. That scale is normally used to determine the weight on an airplane's wheel. It reports our robot's weight as 119 or 120 lb.

FRC official scales are rated for 400 lb and calibrated using 100 lb test weights. So we'll ship the robot tomorrow afternoon, and not know whether we have a weight problem until Thursday morning, nine days later, at the St. Louis Regional.

Until then we can brainstorm ways that our robot could lose some more weight, should that be necessary.

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we are about 6 lbs under and we are done

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Last I heard from the shop we're at 89-ish, but we haven't put in all the heavy code yet. ;)

Roger.

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My best advice to you is to start up a thread with a picture of the robot asking for suggestions. It's hard to give specific diet advice from a short description. How much weight do you need to lose?

How many Clippard tanks do you have mounted? How many do you really need? They're about a pound each.

Is there anywhere you could replace steel fasteners with aluminum rivets or tie-wrap without compromising structural strength too much? I used tie-wrap to mount most of our electronics for weight savings. (Bonus: nonconductive).

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we shipped at 121ish but we will drop a clippard if we cant think of anywhere else to drop some.

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we are about 30 lbs underweight, but we plan on adding lead weights to help keep the balance on our robot

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We are 26 lbs underweight. We will add 15 or 20 lbs of steel bar to help keep it glued to the ground.

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We are 108..YAY! We never thought weight was going to be an issue with our design....sorry I don't pics, it was a fast six weeks.

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We just put our robot in the shipping crate and sealed it. We weighed in at 88 lbs (although we might add ballast later).

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With our robot we were only 4.8 lbs over and when we remove our steal pipes and replace with allumim we will go to .8 and when that is done we will just remove one cylinder to get to 120 lbs exacly .

this is the first year that i feel truely confident in out robot. with a passive popper, powerful launcher, and a good hearder. and ultra sonic hyrpid mode we will hopefully succede.

Team 1980
Team1980.org

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We are about 1lb over, but we have plenty of 1/8 inch 6061 that we can swiss cheese. :)

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We are about a pound under with a 16 inch section of bumper on still.

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Ours went in the box at 90 lbs. This was the first year we didn't have to worry about weight.

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i can understand how all these teams are overweight unless they are throwers....we used steel for just about everything and still made it in at 118 lbs. not that i would recommend that or anything....next year aluminum is the way to go. We didn't even swiss cheese anything.

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It depends a lot on the number of motors and actuators you're using. We're tight on weight and everything structural on our robot is either thin plastic, thin wall aluminum tube, or thin aluminum plate. Part of the reason why we are so close to the weight limit is because we have about 40lbs of actuators and their associated gearboxes. Add sprockets, chain, tensioners, control electronics, mounts, and so on and you have a significant portion of the weight budget. Last year, we used smaller actuators (less power was needed) with less geardown paired to a much more complex superstructure than this year's and we were easily under weight.

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We're a catapult, and we had to swiss cheese only a few pieces to make weight this year. And when I say "only a few," I mean it; we were maybe a pound over after making a few things more robust, and we always have places built in to take weight out if needed.

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I believe our robot is just barely overweight, less thank half a pound. We'll switch out our bolts for aluminum bolts and we put a lighter chain on our arm, which should drop us to the legal limit :)

The funny part was the day before ship date we weighed the robot and it was 118.5lbs. Then I noticed that our 2 pound chain wasn't on the arm :ahh:

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we managed to rig everything up with pulleys instead of pneumatics........it turned out to be just as stable and strong...and just as fast when we made a long lever arm......Plus it prolly saved weight. but our steel frame...not such a great idea....it was nice because we got it free but if we used pneumatics....we would've been WAYYYY over weight

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We actually weighed in right on 120 lbs but we can lighten up a little bit

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Lightning weighed in at around 110 before we put him in the crate.
Our bumpers weigh in at 14 lbs, 12 oz.
It was a miracle for the ÜberBots, because we're always waaaaay overweight. We didn't even need to cut holes in our robot!

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Here is an interesting assignment for you. How many 1" diameter holes will you have to cheese in order for you to remove only one pound. May I suggest a stepped bit, we used one last year with great success.

PS We came in at 122 pounds with the bumpers attached and no back up battery. This is the first time in three years that we did not spend the last few days removing pounds and pounds. We had 1/16th in aluminum tubing last year. I was absolutely astounded by the number of 1" holes we had to cut to make a pound.