Frame Material

[Kevin Sevcik]

We've been building off the kit frame for a few year now, and haven't had any issues with reliability or warping. I think last year was a bit of an outlier. The standard config with the wheel brackets wasn't rigid enough against the diagonal stresses from the chains, so thatb caused problems for teams. With the flat field and standard mounting this year, I think the kit frame will be plenty strong enough for most teams.

As for our usage of it, we've been building it mostly standard, and then putting uprights into the corners that bolt into the side of the corner bracket. It tightens up the corners nicely as well as giving us material to build a second deck on, etc. We build the rest of our frame out of various sizes of 0.065 square tubing, which gives us a nice light but stiff frame

[sdcantrell56]

One very easy way to pretty much fix all the warping problems is to mount a continuous piece of 3/8" baltic birch plywood to the bottom of the frame. Only cut out where you need to for the wheels and chain. This will greatly strengthen the frame plus give you a non-conductive mounting surface for all the electronics.