[Jaine Perotti]

Originally, when I voted in this poll, I voted for "underweight".

Is there any way to change your vote?
Right now, our robot is breaking even, at 120 pounds. However, we are planning on adding more, such as outriggers, arm bracing, etc.

The big question now is this: where can we take out weight? A few days ago, our robot was 9 pounds overweight, so we drilled like crazy, and managed to lose it. But there isn't much left to take weight out!

Andy Brockway took home the gearbox for our arm last night to lighten up the gears, which should take out a tenth of a pound (I think).

We are using a telescoping arm tower, with a rotating tetra arm mounted on top. The outside towers (fixed) are made of aluminum, and the inner towers (which are raised and lowered) are made of UHMW plastic.

We are going to deepen the "rabbit" groove that we put into the UHMW plastic arm towers with a router. We are also contemplating the removal of some of the arm braces (currently there are 4, with 2 on the front, and 2 on the back, and we are thinking of just keeping the ones on the front.). We are also thinking of replacing some of the lexan shielding we are currently using with something thinner.

We have lexan bumpers spanning the front and back ends of our robot, but we are nervous to take weight out of them because of the high force impacts we expect them to take. We have already drilled out alot of our arm, and are concerned that drilling the UHMW any more will make the plastic bend too much and warp (leading to binding issues).

AND... we are wanting to add angle aluminum reinforcements to our UHMW arm, because in testing we found that it would bend under the weight of the tetra arm mounted on top of it. This will add about a pound of weight, but is necessary.

And there are the outriggers, which haven't even been built yet, but will add a minimum of 4 pounds. Our current plan of dealing with this is to build everything else first, drive our robot around, push it to it's limits, and see if outriggers will be necessary. If they are, we will need to figure out a way to add them. If not, we will leave them off.

I am sure we are not the only ones with this dilemma, but boy is it frustrating! Sometimes I feel like it is almost hopeless, but I know that we can pull through it, as we have in the past. We will find a way to do it... because that is what this challenge is all about.

Good luck to everyone!

-- Jaine