Polycarbonate side plates for lighter gearboxes

[Joseph Smith]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

It's interesting that you did that to lighten up some AM Toughboxes, since the TB back plate is polycarb (Lexan) and the front plate is 1/8" aluminum. And AM will sell you aluminum spacers as well.

At any rate, 1/4" Lexan will be about 10% lighter than 1/8" aluminum, for starters. If you're not direct driving out of the gearbox, 1/4" Lexan will be plenty strong enough. The main downside to Lexan is that it's prone to cracking. Not as much as acrylic, but much more so than aluminum. So you'll want to be careful about tightening things and subjecting it to heavy shock loads. There's a reason AM chose aluminum for the front plate of the TB, that's the plate that takes the most load from radial forces on an overhung shaft.

Since 1/4" Lexan only saves 10% over 1/8" aluminum, perhaps you should look elsewhere in the TB for weight savings? AM will sell you aluminum versions of the large gears that will save you 0.56 lbs together. In the past, I've tossed the large gears on a CNC and webbed them to save a similar amount of weight. And there's the aluminum hex output shaft that would save you another 0.1 lbs or so.

So what I'm basically saying is that if all you did to lighten up a TB is custom side plates and spacers, then you have some other low hanging fruit available.

Thanks for the advice, what we did was machine out pockets of aluminum from the plates just for extra weight loss, and we were forced to make them custom because we added an extra banebot 775 to each gearbox.