PNW 2006 -- The Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland

[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.