[Brian Selle]

Originally Posted by Madison

Out of curiosity, approximately how many sheet metal parts do y'all have on a finished robot?

This season is the first that we're designing a majority of parts for manufacture by our sheet metal sponsor and the quantity has been overwhelming. Our sponsor has been very gracious and awesome, but I am not sure if they were expecting to get 100+ parts. We certainly weren't expecting to send that many.

Last year we had 78 unique sheet metal parts, 28 of these required bending, 512 pieces in total. Very similar to what you mentioned, our sponsor wasn't expecting that many parts. They pulled through for us but it was a strain. This year we vowed to reduce the part count and ended up using more of a hybrid sheet metal and tubing model. We ended up with about 17 unique sheet metal parts, 154 pieces in total. Our sponsor contact was bracing for the worst when we recently dropped off the list of parts - after surveying the list he was a happy camper.