[Jon Stratis]

Just to throw another idea in there... what about making the bellypan in pieces? With out design last year, our pan had to be pretty deep to hang off the frame like we wanted. As a result, we couldn't make it out of a single sheet of aluminum - we ended up bending up two sheets, and pop-riveting them together down the middle of the robot. It worked great, and was plenty strong. So if you can work smaller pieces of aluminum and build the pan out of 2-3 sheets instead of one, that could be a viable alternative.