Construction materials

[Veselin Kolev]

Over the summer I did a lot of design and fab work for Berkeley National Labs. Even though it wasn’t robotics you could adapt the concepts and use something like this:

-Cast, porous silicon carbide
-Heat treated aircraft aluminum (surprisingly cheap and easy to make, terribly hard)
-Bronze aluminum alloys

But those are really expensive or hard to do. Unless you get them donated by Berkeley, I don’t recommend you use them. If you’re creative, you can always.. um.. cast your own silicon carbide? I don’t recommend it to anyone with little casting experience. For obvious reasons.

Especially in using aircraft aluminum, if you have the tools to draw the beams in slight arcs (say, radius 200ft) and weld them together with the curve outward, welded as if they were straight, they give your chassis a bouncy feel to it. Kindof makes your chassis into a giant spring. But you have to be VERY careful when you weld it. Tac it here and there to keep it together, and then weld it SYMETRICALLY. If you don’t, your chassis will bend. It takes a lot of practice to weld like this.

If you don’t exactly have a drawer (I expect you don’t) you can always go to an exhaust pipe shop and have them heat treat and bend your tubing for you. It’ll cost a bit, but your chassis will bounce instead of bend. It has worked very well in the past.