Sorry you had trouble. We did not have a similar experience... of course ITEM was one of our sponsors so we could just get as many T-nuts as we needed.
Also, the brand of extrusion is important... some stuff is cheaper, but that's because they use a weaker alloy and lower grade fasteners.
The kits that ITEM is selling for FIRST come with the hardware (nuts, bolts, tnuts, etc.) used to assemble them. The nuts are reusable. All you need is a good drill (drill press recommended) and the proper size of metric allen wrenches. Ball-heal allen wrenches are best. Splurge on a good set of tools as you usually get what you paid for and cruddy tools will damage the screw heads.
Without reinforcement plates, our simple 30x36" robot box frame easily held the weight of our largest (250 lb) team member when they stood in the middle of the bars!
Good luck this year!
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Originally Posted by Skabana159
I disagree. We've tried the extruded frame for the last two years and have had some problems. First, the locking T-nuts are very expensive, and the bolts for them are non-standard and must be ordered rather than just going to ACE and picking them up. You can get the cheaper, non-locking kind, but you have to slide those in from the end and that is often impossible, or at least very inconvienient. Also, the bolts are notorious for coming loose (yes, we even used loctite). Plus, without said triangle plates, it is very difficult to hold a square, even with the inside-corner pieces that you can buy to accomplish this task.
159 has (tentatively, I can't speak for every one) decided to weld a frame this year, and just stick with a design we think will work, rather than become obsessed with morphability.
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