pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

I have a 4' x 4' x 1/4" sheet of steel if you need some ballast.

Or, if it just needs a little bit of ballast, we could use the magnesium anvil

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

the ifi wheels bend extremly easily, we used them one year and got hit once that was it.. the hit wasnt even very hard but the slightest bend and the wheel is scrap, u can reposition it but it never runs the same. so cover them!:o

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

bumpers are not shown, but will be added of course (per the rules)

Thanks for the suggestion too, perhaps we oughta buy some spare side plates for them? although if you used the IFI wheels from 2006 or earlier, they are a different design....we used the new ones last year and didn't have any trouble with them, although they were well protected

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

If you are going to use cantilevered wheels with such a system I would suggest that you weld your dead axels to a large metal plate and then bolt this plate to the fiberglass. Otherwise you will be concentrating a large force on a piece of material that is only 1/8" thick :ahh: I would be worried about an axel tearing out.

Another obvious solution to this problem would be to use a thin sheet of fiberglass to support the outer side of each axel. This would also give you a place to mount the bumpers.

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

just use gold old normal concrete

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

The c-channel is 1/4" thick, and we are going to use 1-1/16" flange nuts to mount the axles. Also, the wheel is pretty close to the c-channel, so there isn't a huge load on the axle.

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

You might want to provide some sort of channel to house your wheels that you can run the axle to so it is not cantilevered. This also provides a mounting base for your bumpers. That way you will fulfill the rule of having 2/3rds of your robot with bumpers around it.

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

We will have bumpers all the way around the robot, and the cantilevered axles are definitely strong enough, and are well supported. The Inventor rendering does not have all the parts on it...so you can see the interesting stuff....but there is more to the robot!

We used a fiberglass I beam turned on it's side for the main frame rails on last years robot, with a thru bolted dead axle. It was quite a bit harder to build, this year we are going for maximum ease of construction, along with a solid, reliable, effective design. We'll see how it does.

Hopefully we'll get some ball handing mechanism pictures up in the next week or so. The catapult experiments went well today, it behaves very safely when not loaded with a ball, and shot a 30" exercise ball (using 1/4 the final pneumatic cylinder capacity) almost high enough to clear the overpass.

Should be fun!

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

Today we built the transmissions and put an axle on a scrap piece of c-channel to test how strong it is. The axle setup is very solid, and i can't see it breaking under any load the robot will see.

Re: pic: 1726 Overdrive Chassis CAD
 

My team has used a cantilevered dead axle system for the past three years with only one major issue that i can remember: bumper mounts. Last year's solution, which proved to be waaay too much trouble was to tap holes into the axles to receive the bolts from our bumpers. May I suggest that you consider integrating mount points into the frame. (I'm pretty sure you already have an adequate solution, though.)