How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

While we were on our way to our first competition this year, one of our mentors who had gone early to uncrate the robot decided to call and say that they had gotten the chance to go in and weigh the robot and we were 6 lbs. overweight!:ahh: After about ten minutes, he called back and said that he was just kidding and he just wanted us to come up with drastic weight loss ideas. Anybody have any ideas?
Here's a few basics:
SWISS CHEESE like crazy
smaller motors

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

remove any extra plexi glass and decorations that add to the weight.

Or just remove the wheels:D

Chris

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

It all depends on the robot....hopefully you know ahead of time how much it really weighs!

We learned this lesson last year, and the weight budget was an important part of design/ build

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

Well do you have an arm bot, ramp bot, or both. If you have two ramps, if it comes down to it you can get rid of one.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

6 pounds? That's nothing. Two days before ship in 2005, we found out we were 60 pounds overweight. The quickest way to lose weight was to scrap most of the drivetrain, swiss cheese the thing, mill down all of our monster gears, and then go over the whole thing with dremels and files to cut out as much as possible. I still don't know how we managed to do it.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

I don't know about the robot since we didn't have that problem this year. However I did tell my wife I wanted to lose 20lbs of ugly fat quickly. She told me to cut off my head. Go figure.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

Yeah. We didn't have that problem this year. It's probably the first time we can actually say that.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

This is the first year we didn't have a weight loss problem because we painstakingly did everything in CAD, made sure all the material properties were set, and also designed 10 pounds under.

In 2005 we were about 10 pounds over, we spent the last week filling every square inch of the bot with holes except for the chassis. Our anodized chassis plate was covered in sharpie marks after all the cutting so we doused it in isopropyl alcohol and set it on fire :cool: Not as quick as scrubbing it with solvent, but much more fun.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

we were about 10 lbs. over this year. we had designed our arm to have an azimuth turntable, but that had to go:(. we ended up not being able to save enough though so we took off one of our lifters.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

Same want for us we were 8 lbs underweight at GSR so we threw the kit compressor on just for the weight.

BTW Great job At the bolermaker reagional.I heard the story and that is too bad about the other robots in the semis. but great job getting as far as you did!!!!

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

Sounds a lot like 868 last year. The Sunday before ship, we weighed our robot and we were something like 30 or 40 pounds overweight. We essentially remade our shooter wheel in the matter of a few hours. Unfortunately, it sorta threw the alignment off - the curve was designed for the larger wheels.

This year I asked our mechanical lead several times during the build season, "If we had to cut weight, what would we take out?"

Our mechanical lead made sure that we weighed the robot at least once a week, and we weighed every part that we made before it went on and kept track of it.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

Yes, much much MUCH (:D) more fun!

I remember, though I wasn't on the team, our 2005 bot was swiss-cheesed like crazy, as was the lexan wall on our '06 bot (5-ft long board of lexan= HEAVY. 5-ft long board of swiss-cheesed lexan: LIGHT). We did better on our '07 bot, but we were still 1-2 lbs. over, so we swiss cheesed our arm stuff and that was that.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

This year we weighed in at 119.9 of 120.

Last year (rookie year) we made our electrical panel out of two sheets of 3/8 plexiglass, which was eventually swiss-cheesed beyond recognition. This year we made it out of 1/16 fiber composite (grade GR-10/FR-4 Garolite).

P.S. Garolite is amazing stuff.

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

similar story only we were 20 pounds over before we shipped it, so we cut it off using many saws and a really long time... funny part of the story is getting to the competition and finding out we were still 20 pounds over :o our scale was way off.... and we missed our practice matches that year...... and our robot looked like a piece of crap...... lol anyways... best of luck for overweight people:D

Re: How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours
 

we are adding weight on thursday. about 15 lbs worth i think.