Aluminum chain?

[kevin.li.rit]

Again what if your runninnig hubless sprockets?

[bstempi]

Well, here's some things we did to cut off on wieght:

1) Not only did we turn down our hubs, but we put holes in the sprockets. Now it looks like something from american choppers .

2) Replace all of your steel rods with aluminum rods. Doing this will reduce the wieght of all of the rods by 33%.

3) We used the 2x4 beams. We swiss cheesed them. By strageicly and CAREFULLY placing holes, we cut about 2 lbs off of out bot.

4) Tires are wieght, too. To also help with friction problems, we took our pneumatic tires, took off the tire and tube, and replaced it with pool hosing. This loses about 3/4 lbs per wheel, and greatly reduced friction for you out there with skid steering.

5) We put everything on boards. only our electrical board used it's entire surface. We cut the excess off of other boards and lost about 1 -2 lbs.

Just in case you were wondering, we were 14 lbs over. We're pretty close to being in spec now. One other useful tip would be to point your fans downward for a bit of extra lift (jk).

Hope this helps.
~Bstem

[Max Lobovsky]

Originally Posted by bstempi

2) Replace all of your steel rods with aluminum rods. Doing this will reduce the wieght of all of the rods by 33%.

I believe it would reduce your weight to 33% of what it was with steel beams, not reduce by 33%.

[Cory]

I would not reccomend mounting any wheels or anything you expect to put a lot of torque/force on with aluminum shafts. A person can bend a 3/8" aluminum shaft by hand, just think of what a robot moving at 10 fps will do to it!

Cory