Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I'll answer for him. He's using 3 aluminum angles across the front and back. It certainly doesn't really match up with the strength of his side walls, but I don't think it's really that flimsy assuming you have bumpers to spread the load. A corner hitting a single angle would definitely be bad, but with a bumper the load would be better spread over several angles and a larger area laterally.
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Will the three pieces of angle be perpendicular to the side rails, or will two of them be perpendicular with the other four bring used they connect from a point from along the front and rear members to the side walls to triangulate the chassis and better spread the load of a impact front/rear back into the chassis? Or will it be something entirely different?
I ask this, because last year during the mentor matches at Beantown Blitz, an impact to the rear of our robot bent the rear member of our frame in by about 0.5 to 0.75 of an inch
through the bumper. The wood inside the bumper absorbed most of the impact by splintering slightly upon the impact.
After this, I've been a little cautious about the actual impact capacity of bumpers. I haven't seen lots of traffic here on Delphi about teams splintering their bumpers, so it is possible that there was just a void from a knot in one of the interior plys that formed a weak spot. Your mileage may vary.
A top view of the damage on the rear chassis member. (To put this in context, it's the rear chassis member in this photo of the robot, sans bumpers.)
