What COTS parts would you like to see?

[BoilerMentor]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

The COTs parts available through Vexpro, AndyMark, and McMaster made all of our design work very easy. I'm glad we have so many parts available now compared to years ago!

One part we end up making a lot of, and isn't easy to do if you are a low resource team with no mill/lathe, is spacer inserts for tubes. These let you do through-bolt connections that can be tightened without crushing the tube, so you actually have a strong bolted joint. For VexPro in particular, spacers like this that fit their Versaframe extrusion sizes could be very useful for some teams.

In years past where crushing box was an issue, we would rip down a piece of scrap hardwood on a table saw to fit snugly within a tube and just use that. Does exactly what you're after and would be way easier to position and use than a round spacer. I can see positioning one of those little round spacers and lining it up with the bolt holes being a royal pain, especially if it's deep in a tube that's already attached to the robot.