Quote:
Originally Posted by FoXy92
I have a question I've wondering about for a while.
It seems like lately I've seen a lot of CAD models for drivetrains including wood as material for them, and I was just wondering what the advantages are to this as opposed to using aluminum or some other material?
Is it cost or weight savings that is the main advantage? If someone could shed some light on the topic I'd appreciate it a lot.
Thanks in advance
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Depends on who you're asking... We realized last year that baltic birch plywood is an amazing material to build robots with because it is very easy to machine and also available locally (meaning we don't have to wait around for materials, which has always killed our build in the past). From our experience the weight has been about the same with our wood frames compared to our other frames, but that wasn't our deciding factor when choosing to use wood.
I like the use of wood wheels in this rendering, that's something that we had been pondering for a while when we were in our drivetrain brainstorming frenzy last year. We never came up with a design that was fast and easy enough to build to make us choose custom wheels over more expensive store bought wheels, though. We are generally pretty lazy...
One other note on the design: I would think that bumper mounting would be easier if the side rails were oriented to make the outside edge of the robot flat (instead of having those flanges). Of course, if the bumper rules follow the trends of past few years then predicting bumper mounting criteria is but the dream of a madman.