pic: How 1251 shipped.

[Dillon Compton]

Hey- Dont worrry, you arent the only team in this situation (we shipped with a robot that would be expected in the middle of week 5, at best...). An excellent way we found to cut weight was to replace our heavier box and extruded aluminum with (i think it was 1/8" wall) inch box aluminum with a 3/8" speedhole ~ every 3/4"(on all 4 faces). We used our drillpress, took an hour to do all the pieces we needed; just look at where you will need to attach and dont speedhole there, because you will need to throughbolt. This brought the weight down to about .1lbs/foot for material that wont be taking a beating (hopper frame, stuff inside your 'bot profile, etc...)- heck, it's even pretty strong- I am about 240-250lbs, and I held a 3 ft length of speedholed box at an angle on the ground and stood on it, so it was supporting all my weight and being levered against my foot, and it took me about 5 mins of continuous pressure to get a relatively slight bend.

Good luck, and remember, if nothing else, defense is always useful!

[David Guzman]

Thanks everyone for the support. Just to answer some questions and suggestions.

-The wheels are made out of UHMW and the came out to be about $12.00 each and about 1.5 hours of CNCing each one. Also each one weight just under half pound so taking the middle one out wouldn't make a big difference.

-The shooter can not come back on because of the way it was taken off, when we started "the diet" many welds were cutted and makes it impossible for some pieces to come back on.

-As shown in the picture (plus electronics, and storage tanks) the robot weights 109 lbs so we don't have the need to remove pneumatics. Also we will be using the air for a dump truck design.

-We are planing on putting a dump truck in the back of the robot at UCF and we think of cutting up the current hopper to suit our needs.

-Also the paint job looked great before the diet.


Thanks everyone for the support and we have tons of work for Thursday.

No matter what happens to the robot we learned our lesson and we had fun. That's what matters, we still think we can make this a very competitive robot but we were expecting to have a killer machine as you can see on the other pictures. Sometimes we have to go through rough things to become wiser and well as much as i don't like to cut our bot to pieces it was needed to learn our lesson. We are also proud of this robot because it was all student designed, student machined and student built.

Good Luck to every one.

Dave