What materials do you most commonly use on your robots?

[Mark Sheridan]

Last year we did a west coast drive style aluminum frame with sheet metal inserts. It was 1x2" aluminum box tubing 1/8" thick and 1x1" box tubing 1/16" thick. Our belly pan was 0.090" thick. Our climber was 1/8" sheet metal. I forget when steel we used in the climber but it was 1/4".

this year wear going heavier into sheet metal. We are back to having more sheet metal resources than welding. So likely most of the robot will be 6000 series aluminum at .125 , .090 and .060" thickness. to avoid welding, we will be machining and cutting gussets to hold any 1x1" box tubing we way use via rivets or screws. We had some good luck with ABS bearing blocks last year, so we will continue to use that. We makes ours thicker so they are for applications were a very thin aluminum block is not practical. We will also being making our larger gearboxes out of machine 1/4" aluminum. Our smaller boxes will be 0.090" aluminum sheet metal likely. A few other material we may use include Acetal, HDPE and PTFE. We may get into machining a few shafts with 7000 series aluminum, whatever we can dig up at the scrap yard.