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Unread 16-04-2007, 22:19
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Karthik Karthik is offline
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Re: Curie Semifinal 1 - 3, what happened?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vogel648 View Post
It was a design flaw, not saying that the ramming was legal or anything like that, but it was a design flaw. Honestly, your arm should be able to hold up to the point where you tip over or be designed to fail in a way that is simple to repair(such as: shear pins).
Umm, okay.

The failure was a stress failure, the tube was actually stretched and torn apart, not twisted. Yes, an aluminum tube was ripped apart.

Also, during the push, the arm held up enough and ended up twisting the rack 40 degrees, before it actually failed. Yes, it twisted the 330 pound rack 40 degrees. I'm not saying our arm was bullet proof, but saying a 3 foot lever arm needs to withstand at least 200 pounds of pushing force is ridiculous.

As for simple to repair, we had our spare arm on the robot and ready to compete in 15 minutes, just in case the ruling was overturned.
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