Sheet Metal, 8-Wheel Drive Design

[jwfoss]

Excellent mix of COTS parts with a custom chassis.

A few lessons learned from 2168 over that past two years with sheet metal work:
- On the inside rails the C shaped bend configuration makes it difficult to mount superstructure components on the flush surface, we now use an S shaped rail.
- With the ground clearance you have you might want to consider a 4"/5" and adjusting your gearing accordingly
- Gearing wise you are being conservative, those are similar numbers to our 2011 robots initial speeds, we eventually changed our output sprocket to increase our high gear to ~14ft/s
- In sheet metal we like to run all dead axles, this also allows us the ability to change our gearing by only swapping a sprocket.
- I would increase the center drop to 1/8" (that's what our 2012 robot ran with the 8wd) Colson wheels do wear down, so be aware of this as well.
- With lightening patterns talk to your sponsor, if they are using a punch it may be faster to manufacture with holes of standard sizes

Keep up the good work.