Painting and Scheduling

[Mr V]

I've always wanted to ship out a bunch of stock to have it anodized before we mill it. I think it would look great if for example we did all the 1x1 tube in gold while the 1x2 was done in black and in either case the weight reduction holes would really pop in the raw aluminum silver. Yes it would require being a little more careful when clamping it in the vice for milling.

Years ago one of our then students and a couple of mentors did anodize the pieces for the competition robot before final assembly. However since they built the tanks themselves and they had a problem with them leaking the mentor got frustrated and tossed all the tanks and he has since left the team.

[Gdeaver]

Personally I like naked robots. My team disagrees. There always seems to be 1 more weld or process the painting interferes with.

[dtengineering]

I was always hesitant to paint or powder coat the aluminum parts of the robot. Occasionally... very occasionally, we would have to take a metal part to the machine shop at an event and ask them to weld it, or to weld something to it. Admittedly it doesn't take long to clean paint off a part... or even powder coat... but it does take time.

Of course we had not such concerns when we made the robots out of wood. Aniline dyes and lacquer were our blingy finish!

Jason

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Of course we had not such concerns when we made the robots out of wood. Aniline dyes and lacquer were our blingy finish!

Jason

Your wooden robots are still some of my favorites, especially 2010!

[Doug G]

We started powdercoating the robot in 2012 and it definitely adds ~3 days to the build process. But the result is worth it in my opinion. The whole team takes a lot of pride in a nicely finished product. The real trick is to find a powdercoater that will work with you on your timeline. Our sponsor, Classic PowderCoating, actually delivered some of our parts to us as soon as they were ready. He even ran out of gold flake while doing some of the pieces and drove to San Jose to pick up more that same day to finish the job.

Other things to consider is the 2-3 hours of filing/reaming bearing holes and such. It also adds 2-4 lbs.

Our week 6 schedule has our robot frame, wheels, and manipulator components ready to go to the powdercoater on Monday of that week. The powdercoater agrees to get it back to us no later than Thursday afternoon. We then do an all day/night session on Thursday-Friday assembling and wiring the robot to have it ready to scrimmage on Saturday (some assembly happens at the Scrimmage as well). Since we can't do much with a robot that is at the paint shop, our programmers/drivers are busy testing code and practicing on our first unpainted robot.

[Qbot2640]

I'm hoping to add build-site powder coating this year with one of these:

http://www.eastwood.com/dual-voltage...arter-kit.html


and the old, ugly (but still functional) electric kitchen stove I just replaced.

[Brandon Holley]

We anodized our bots from 2006-2012, and we really loved the look of it. We often did 2 batches of 2 colors a piece. We were fortunate enough to have sponsors able to turn the parts around in 2-3 days. Even still, with the cleaning, prep, etc, we ended up taking 4-5 days out of the schedule to do so.

Last year we built our own powdercoating oven. It took a decent chunk of effort, but it's been one of the best things we've ever done. The whole team is involved in the coating of parts, from cleaning, prepping, spraying the parts to prepping the oven and clean-up. We're able to go from raw material to CNC to coated part assembled to a robot in a matter of hours.

If you have the means, and really want to 'paint' your bots, its an awesome way to keep the timeline under control.

See some of these attached photos of the oven and a batch of parts we cranked out in a single day.

-Brando