pic: Plywood 8WD Concept

[Travis Schuh]

Originally Posted by z_beeblebrox

Some more specs not in the original post:
Our team has a sheet metal sponsor, but they have about a week turnaround time. We also have a laser cutter in-house which cuts plywood so if we use wood, we can get our parts much more quickly.

One week turnaround is actually very good. We built our entire robot last year with 2 to 3 week turn on all of our sheet parts. You are lucky to have a sponsor that treats you so well, take care of them.

I would argue that particularly for a drive train, the 1wk turn on sheet parts is more than sufficient. Our approach with the drive train is to send out the parts for fab week 1 while we are continuing to design the super structure. By the time we have the superstructure designed and sent out for fab, the drive train parts are coming back. Having sponsors help us with fabrication lets us focus on design and speeds up the process.