Quote:
Originally Posted by ksafin
Thanks for the quick replies guys, I'll forward all of this to our Mechanical Captain.
While I'm one of the more mechanically savvy guys on the team, the final call is to the captain 
Also, another question/concern. With 80/20, we had the flexibility of just putting a drivetrain together with the parts, and then when we needed to change something or add something, it was a matter off adding a connector or taking this off or adding this. Very simple, with little modification.
I imagine that by using aluminum sq tubing w/ gussets and all, we'll have to plan our drivetrain out much more thoroughly than we did with 80/20 (unless we plan to have a lot of random holes from taking gussets off and on xD)
Is this correct, and how do you cope w/ this? |
We've been known to add a few extra holes to our robot through bad planning. In 2011, we even took a piece of our arm structure, rotated it around, and drilled a new hole for lack of another piece.
It all comes down to what kinds of forces your pieces will see and how picky you are about appearance. When we botched parts on this year's robot, we took the metal that was still usable in-place and redrilled new holes and placed putty into the holes left behind to smooth it out. Metal that was too weakened from the holes for our liking was cut down and reused in other places when possible. Very few pieces were junked entirely.
But, of course, you can always plan it out and avoid all this.