pic: Wood Coast Drive V2

[Sperkowsky]

Does the plywood ever warp over time?

[TheOtherGuy]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

When you decide to use plywood, do you do any calculations to guide your design? Do you use any of the formulas that civil engineers use for plywood (such as http://www.canply.org/pdf/main/plywood_designfund.pdf), do you use rules of thumb you can share, or do you just iterate until it works?

Are the captured nuts the only way you fasten the sheets, or do you glue them as well? Do you find the structure fails at the fastener typically, or some other way?

Thanks again for sharing

Mostly we iterate Last year was the first with primarily plywood, so there was little worry about strength (no defense). We'll see if this year is different. Typically we just try to use good judgement on the placement of sheets. We didn't glue much on our last robot, but we're looking at gluing for tight spaces this year where we can't fit a captive nut. We have seen a few breaks near the slots in a recent side project.. better to learn that now than in 2 months.

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

Does the plywood ever warp over time?

It does, our space doesn't have much protection from the environment, so we get occasional warping after a few weeks. We're going to develop a jig to flatten the sheets in the cutter before build season. On the robot it doesn't matter much - if it's designed right, the warping disappears when constructed.