Quote:
Originally Posted by thatprogrammer
That can depend. Our sponsor, for example, provided us with a belly pan for free, and actually wanted to show it off to potential customers because they loved it. If you needed to spend money or your own time to make one though, I would just use a wood bellypan.
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The amount of cut time (and material) going into a single fancy bellypan could provide gearbox plates, gussets, etc. for many systems.
So if an appreciable amount of your total sponsor and in house resources is used for the bellypan, it should instead be used on other aspects of the robot.
If getting the bellypan cut doesn't rob resources that could be better used elsewhere, that's a different story (few teams actually fall into this category, but many think they do).