PNW 2006 -- The Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland

[Rick TYler]

I can't recommend any especially good restaurants (we ate at Red Robin on Friday night), but it is a fun town if you have a car. The area right around the convention center isn't really tourist friendly.

This is a tournament where the local teams have a huge advantage. Californians come up here and rust solid by Thursday night.

[sciencenerd]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

I can't recommend any especially good restaurants (we ate at Red Robin on Friday night), but it is a fun town if you have a car. The area right around the convention center isn't really tourist friendly.

This is a tournament where the local teams have a huge advantage. Californians come up here and rust solid by Thursday night.

Yeah, I remember our team was leaving Red Robin just as you guys showed up!

And I'm sad about the wood thing, your robot last year was awsome!

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by sciencenerd

Yeah, I remember our team was leaving Red Robin just as you guys showed up! And I'm sad about the wood thing, your robot last year was awsome!

Good memory about a meal a year ago.

It's funny about materials. I build plywood/fiberglass/epoxy composite boats as a hobby (two canoes and sailboat so far). Really good okoume marine plywood is very light, stiff, and strong. Pound for pound, it is stiffer than aluminum. It lacks puncture resistance, and doesn't particularly "like" metal fasteners so it is probably not the best material for the chassis, but for most structural parts on the 'bot it is a very competitive material. Given the chance, I would like to have built Top Gun out of an aluminum chassis and a composite wood/glass/epoxy structure combined with select metal components. Ironically, a plywood composite structure would be much lighter and stronger than the fiberglass "pultrusion" beams used by some teams, but would still have the negative public opinion of wooden construction.

The real world calculus, though, is that we don't think most of the students involved in FIRST appreciate anything other than aluminum and Lexan. People ooh'ed and ah'ed over water-cut gears and color anodized aluminum last year, and didn't even notice our laminated I-beam towers on Wooden Thunder (the towers still worked last week when we demonstrated Woodie to some students by picking up metal cafeteria chairs and driving around with them). We made the decision to go all-aluminum and Lexan at least in part because we didn't want the negatives associated with wooden construction that we felt last year.

Since I have so much experience with composites, I would have preferred to use them again (and I really wanted to build some laminated carbon fiber/epoxy components), but I had to agree with the decision to go with a metal and plastic bot.

[Alekat]

I like your perspective, it's quite refreshing to have someone thinking out of the box from a materials point of view. But what does this have to do with the meal again?

[dtengineering]

While the general public might ooh and ahh over fancy aluminum and composites, the judges at PNW are quite willing to look "outside the box" for intelligent application of materials. Last year we picked up the Xerox Creativity award at PNW, and while having two completely different scoring mechanisms (a multi-tetra "flipper" for the low goals and an arm for the high ones), they also really liked that our arm was fabricated of baltic birch plywood.

We had a demo arm in the pits that we placed on blocks and encouraged the judges to bounce on it... the arm, weighing less than 3 lbs, did not budge... even under the weight of three judges.

Wood -- used properly -- is an amazing material. A solid cylindrical column of wood is stiffer and more resistant to buckling than a solid column of almost any other material of similar mass. What is even more interesting is that in certain construction applications wooden columns can actually have a higher fire resistance rating than unprotected steel columns. In wood the outside will char and serve as insulation, while similar strength steel columns or beams can be heated until they become soft and flexible, collapsing under their own weight. Note that this applies only to thick columns, and UNINSULATED steel...

Oh, yeah... we'll have the baltic birch back again. It is beautiful wood.

Looking forward to a great weekend in Portland... can you guys arrange for more weather like last year's? This rain is getting a bit tedious.

Jason

P.S. Looking for plywood inspiration? Check out the DeHavilland Mosquito... arguably (and no... I'm not looking to start an argument with the Boeing fans... they have good arguments, too) the best bomber of WWII. Pretty much all plywood!