One thing I disagree with in this thread is that you "NEED" to powder coat or anodize to make you robot look professional. Whether you want your robot to be colored or not should be purely up to if you as a team think it would look good. For example, take a look at our robot this year. Bare metal frame, but it still managed to be IMO the most colorful robot out there
. Anyway I don't think Wildstang has ever colored our frame. This in large part due to we are constantly tweaking our robot up to the ship date and even after. If we decided that we wanted to color all the changed parts/assemblies (and think of all the colors) it would just add unneeded turnout time of parts for our robot. Plus the weight. It isn't a lot, but when you somehow always end up a tad bit over, every little bit counts (hence the cheese holed frame).