Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

Nick's points are very valid though; try to reduce the time invested in such things, especially when you can just use smaller tubing and leave it whole.

Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

You have a SuperShifter and a sprocket reduction driving a 4 inch wheel. That can't make for a very fast robot at all. What were your thoughts regarding gearing? Am I missing something?

Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

All of these look really nice, but there seem to be some practicality issues.

For example, you should give some thought as to how you plan to join the metal on Day 1's design.

On Day 2's design, you have a completely rounded edge on your sideplates. Admittedly, this looks awesome, but ask yourself if you want to invest the time in rounding an edge completely.

Day 3's design looks really good. The only issue I see (and this isn't crucial) is that your axles are press-fit into the tubes. This could work, but you would have to weld your axles in place. An alternative would be to tap the ends of the axle and bolt the axle from the outside of the tube. With this method, you would have to put bearings on the wheel (dead axle). Instead, you could press-fit the bearings wherever the axle passes through the tube and fix the wheel on the axle (live axle).

Overall, they look really nice! Keep up the good work!

Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

Just... Wow... Congrats on making a number of different designs in such a short time span. Looks like most of the faults I can see straight off have already been covered but those are minor fixes if you wanted to fix them.

While I can't say anything about the designer, I can say that your observation about an unaltered SuperShifter would be correct. In fact, when our own team came across this problem a few weeks ago we had to do some work to figure out how fast exactly we wanted to go. After doing so, we figured out how to change the gear/sprocket ratio to to do that. Part of the solution was to use some alternate cluster/output gears available from AM to adjust for that. The other part was to slightly change the driving-driven sprocket ratio.

My .02$

Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

Wait, how do you cut your aluminum like that? A cnc machine? Our robot chassis is very "crude" every year, just aluminum bars welded together without any thing fancy. I assume you guys start with aluminum sheets and cut it out and weld it? Is it any stronger? I would assume a solid bar is stronger but looks ugly

Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

Look at this UGLY chassis! :rolleyes:

Welded tube is by no means a bad frame design, many teams obviously believe it superior to the plate sandwich setups many teams run. We run a frame annually very similar and heavily influenced by the one linked.

Re: Team 68's 40 days of chassis Design.
 

Done correctly sheet metal can be more than strong enough. And it does look rather cool too. It requires more specialized equipment, though.

That said, there's nothing inherently keeping a bar stock chassis from looking pretty sleek.