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Originally Posted by jimfortytwo
Baltic 1/2" plywood base
welded thin wall aluminum tube for appendages
Six wheel drive, four motors, three speeds: In other words, we insist that wood is a design decision, and not a lack of options.
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Don't tell anyone, but wood is easily machined, easily fastened, and, pound for pound, is stiffer than any material normally used in these robots. It is also elastic and cheap. The lower component of our arm is made up of high-quality zero-void plywood I-beams that we fabricated ourselves. Our bumpers and electronics platform are also wood. We are also using aluminum and steel.
Some of us wanted to use carbon fiber tubes but we couldn't get the material quickly and some people on the team (*ahem*, not me, but some of the students) were leery of using something that they had no experience with. A friend of mine made a 26-foot-long 3-inch-diameter sailboat mast out of carbon fiber, biaxial fiberglass, and epoxy. It weighed six pounds. OK, so his partner helped design one of the carbon-fiber/epoxy America's Cup yachts, but it was still pretty impressive. And he sells the kits for a non-vacuum-bag, no-oven-required building method.
- Rick