Quote:
Originally Posted by snekiam
What led you to using such thick metal for your bot?
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Zac gave a pretty thorough explanation above, but I'll add on a little. The reasons why we didn't make each particular 1/4" part thinner vary, but here are a few notable ones:
- 1/4" thickness is convenient with most bearings we use
- 8-32 bolts can be tapped into the side of 1/4" plate without leaving too thin a wall
- Section stiffness is proportional to thickness cubed, so when stiffness against bending is important, it's better to lighten thick material vs. using thin material that's light to start with
- Tapping into the face of 1/4" plate with 8-32's and (to a lesser degree) 10-32's approaches the tensile strength of the bolt itself
- For the hood specifically, we wanted a large surface area in contact with the boulders to minimize any damage to them
I'm sure there are a few places where we would have been just fine with thinner plate, but, in the end, we were able to fit in all the functionality we wanted under 120lbs, so there wasn't much of a cost to us. Additionally,
waste not want not on those 4'x4's
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On the whole thick-vs-thin topic, I'm a really big fan of thin-wall tubes, but thick-and-lightened is often a good way to go for plates.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zac
The 4 main plates that make up the frame were 0.25" aluminum.
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The outer two are 3/16", actually
