Mounting the arm

[Frank(Aflak)]

To mount an arm:

Build your robot so you have a plate about 4.5' in the air. Put a brass plain bearing in it. Also put a bearing directly below, around where your motors are. Buy a 5' section of thinwalled steel 1" pipe, put it through the bearings, weld a segment of 5/8" shaft to the top, put bearings on that, and your arm on the bearings. Put a sprocket on the lower part of the steel pipe, drive it with a motor to give yourselves a turret. Fix a sporcket to the welded 5/8" shaft on top, put a gearbox on the arm, chain it to the sprocket.

And your done. Maybe add another segment or two after the first one for a really cool arm.

[Rhs953]

I was being "cute" with the word duct tape

anyways i dont think ducttape would be able to hold the amout of torque anyways.

______________________________
I didn't break it!

[NateBot16]

We welded ours to our frame, not the best idea now that I think about it, but not much we can do about it now. Basically we have one centeral column going up our robot, at the top there is a notched out area, and a hole going throught the side walls. Then we put a bearing and axel in there. The area with the notch is for a movible arm. We just drilled a hole thought that, and placed it on the axel going throught the centeral column. Finally we just hooked up a motor to the base of the centeral column, put cable around it, and attached the other end to the moviable part. And "waaa la", an arm.

I would highly suggest bolting it, just becasue welds are not fun to break.

[Solace]

oh, come on! welds are lots of fun to break, they're just not that much fun to fix.

[Max Lobovsky]

Who needs arms when you've got a..... forklift! Our monster drawer sliders are mounted with two reinforced, shelf, L-brackets that are bolted to the frame and the lift.

Now that i think about it, Our robot may have an additional function as an organizer

[Solace]

and the survey says..................

bubblegum

that's right, we've locked the entire team in the basement for the past 4 weeks so that they can dilligently chew up enough bubblegum to not only attach the arm but to make on the spot repairs at the competitions.

[Elgin Clock]

Mount it 3 ways!
A) Very carefully and acurately - so you don't extend the profile.
B) Very securely - so when you extend it somehow, your robot doesn't break.
C) Very center of gravity-ish - so you don't tip as you retract and/or pivot it!!

That's all I got!