Quote:
Originally Posted by nuclearnerd
If you can buy a COTS part in hard-anodized 7075-t6 and it comes with a good reputation, by all means - enjoy the tiny weight savings (and reduced wear life). But if you are designing a small, highly stressed component in house, I suggest you save yourself the hassle.
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Our 2014 robot disagrees...
In 2014 we built a 12 wheel gear drive that utilized a total 22 7075 gears from VexPro and 10 lengths of 7075 hex shaft for the idlers. These were all driven by 3-CIM Ball Shifters geared for 3.25fps overall drive speed in low gear. After over 60 matches of dragging other robots across the field during the season, and various off-season demos since then, all the gears and shafts have virtually no visible wear on them and run like they're brand new.
Had these parts been made of steel (including the gears in the gearboxes), our robot would have been about 12lbs overweight, just in the drive system.
Compare to our 2007 robot which the 2014 design was based off of, which did use all steel gears and was so heavy virtually every other part of the robot had to be made out of carbon fiber-foam composite.
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