Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
This "makes no sense whatsoever" makes no sense whatsoever. If all goes well, there never was meterial outside of the bounding box of the part. However, every bit of material that was originally inside the bounding box of the part but cut away (i.e. in a pocket) is thrown away (or hopefully recycled, especially if aluminum). I certainly hope you don't discount the material originally in the pockets from your BoM; that would have violated the last several years of rules!
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Say you have a gearbox plate. Whether it was pocketed or not, it will end up on the robot as part of the gearbox. The material that is eventually pocketed was likely not going to be used elsewhere on the robot, so the fact that the material is there or not becomes irrelevant. It then becomes advantageous to just remove it in order to save weight - why not take every advantage you can get, right? I understand it's not much and for most teams there are better things to spend time on and ways to prevent this from becoming a large factor (my team did not pocket most plating on our robots), but if you can do it, might as well.