Quote:
Originally Posted by Type
So I wouldn't be able to bring like a 5ft piece of aluminum then cut it down to like 3ft and 2ft? It may be worth it to drill a bunch of holes into the lexan to cut down the weight even more.
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If you can find a place where you can purchase a 5 ft piece of aluminum, you're golden in the situation you describe (assuming the holes are drilled at competitiion).
We (and many other teams as I understand it) bring in "random" lengths and areas of various metal and other material stock that are left over from previous construction. Our general rule as a team is that all cuts on these items shall be square (no bevel or miter cuts) and that nothing shall be cut to a length that is meaningful on our robot. (E.g. if we have arms made of 29" lengths of 1"x1" aluminum, a 29" length is a "fabricated" length, and a 33" length is a "random" length. However, if our arms were 33" long, the reverse would probably be true.) While this may stretch the letter of the rules a bit, we feel it honors the full spirit of the rules, in that we must do just as much cutting on the COTS items we bring in as if they really were "full size" COTS parts.
As it turns out, very little of our metal stock is delivered to our workshop in entirely "COTS as we bought it" condition. Apart from our Versaframe, we get most of our angle and c-channel from a local company (Bayou Metals) that sells in 20 foot lengths; we usually carry it the two or three miles to our workshop in roughly 10 foot lengths, because it is carried on top of an SUV or small pickup that is only about 14-16 feet long.
If you want to be really strict on this, cut your "random" pieces to multiples of 12", and you can almost certainly justify your pieces to be COTS-equivalent as available from onlinemetals.com or a similar website.