[Madison]

Originally Posted by JesseK

I did that with our drive train this year. Aside from the chains, everything went together very quickly once we got it back from being powder coated. It also took no time at all to cut things. Next year we'll look for ways to get rid of the chains.

I tried to do that for our lift, but we used 80/20. Trying to mate anything to 80/20 in Solidworks effectively kills the assembly down the line, as it seems that none of the mates seem to save properly, nor are there pre-made templates. I wound up using placeholders but the dimensions are still off from what the real robot has. Then on top of that there's so much shifting and adjusting and "omg! I forgot to put a slider there for another screw! Take this apart!" crap.

Are you using the 80/20 part files from the FIRST CAD library? Those models, particularly, seem to have been created by tracing the 80/20 profile from a catalog or something; none of the edges are orthogonal and it makes mating things together nearly impossible.

I ended up modeling the 80/20 extrusion myself.