pic: Lightweight swerve Chassis

[Bryce2471]

loading photo ...

[asid61]

What's the thickness of the 2x1?

[Bryce2471]

What's the thickness of the 2x1?

It's 0.0625"
that's what I've heard a lot of good teams recommend for WCD, and this is a similar aplication.

[Jared]

Originally Posted by Bryce2471

It's 0.0625"
that's what I've heard a lot of good teams recommend for WCD, and this is a similar aplication.

I'd be a little scared of the 1/16th wall tube for your drive base. We used 1/8th last year, and we had a strong one piece bumper protecting it, and we managed to bend our front a little bit. I would imagine that the damage would have been a lot worse if we had thinner wall thickness.

That said, I doubt next year's game will involve so much ramming, so you might be able to get away with it.

[Bryce2471]

Originally Posted by Jared

I'd be a little scared of the 1/16th wall tube for your drive base. We used 1/8th last year, and we had a strong one piece bumper protecting it, and we managed to bend our front a little bit. I would imagine that the damage would have been a lot worse if we had thinner wall thickness.

That said, I doubt next year's game will involve so much ramming, so you might be able to get away with it.

Thanks for the advise. That's something that would have to be decided after the game is announced.
I think that this chassis would be fine in most games because the extrusions would have strong gussets, and a large belly pan to support them.

[Marc S.]

1/16" wall tubing is plenty strong enough as long as your bumpers are built correctly. The main reason elite teams use 1/8" for WCD's is because they need the strength for the bearing block slots.

973 used exclusively 1/16" 2"x1" 6061 tubing on "Emperor Swerve" and "Encore", which were both swerve drives back when the base was 28"x38".

[azcalg]

Not really related to the design, which I think is awesome, but just out of curiosity, how long did this take to CAD? I also get in CADing moods and we've been planning on an octocanum drive train for this year and I've made countless versions of it and they usually take anywhere from 4-12 hours to hammer out all the details and assemble everything.

[Bryce2471]

Originally Posted by azcalg

Not really related to the design, which I think is awesome, but just out of curiosity, how long did this take to CAD? I also get in CADing moods and we've been planning on an octocanum drive train for this year and I've made countless versions of it and they usually take anywhere from 4-12 hours to hammer out all the details and assemble everything.

Thanks!
Because this model was designed almost entirely from scratch, it took good 6-ish hours of CADing to get to the point shown in the picture. When I get a chance, I'll do some other versions of this design, and those designs shouldn't take as long as this one did.
It also helps that I have some experience designing swerves, and drive trains in general.