Weight Reduction

[AustinSchuh]

When you are designing, if you know that you are going to be overweight, it is easier to drop the wall thickness on stock instead of cutting holes in it. To take out the same amount of weight in holes as going from 1x1 tube with 1/8 inch walls to 1x1 tube with 1/16 inch walls would take lots of holes and time.

[GaryVoshol]

Whatever you do, don't drill speed holes in the pneumatics system.

[Hieb]

Originally Posted by GaryV1188

Whatever you do, don't drill speed holes in the pneumatics system.

Why not? Then you would save the weight of the metal AND the air.

[Billfred]

1618 hasn't gotten into the weight-reduction business (their past two robots have been far underweight, and this year's is still obviously in the pipeline), but I do remember a few tricks from 1293:

-Switching out our 1/8" aluminum hopper for a thinner stainless one
-Hacking off most of our tower (not because we were overweight, but because the weight was high up)
-Gratuitous use of the slugbuster (a hydraulic device for poking large circular holes in sheetmetal)
-Cutting the team numbers into our covers, causing us to lose weight for a required feature rather than gain it
-Rivets, rivets, and more rivets (and rivet nuts for places we needed to get in and out of)
-Running as short a wire as we could safely use (something I'm sure Al Skierkiewicz is happy to see as well)
-Thin-walled metal spacers on our Kitbot axles
-Going from six polycord runs on our ball pickup to four (and ultimately zero with the top getting chopped, but that's a whole other ball of wax)
-Plastic belt pulleys instead of metal
-Plain paper and Velcro for attaching school and sponsor information. (It works, I swear!)

[Brian C]

Well one of our experiences last year was that we were 12oz overweight at tech for the regional. This was already AFTER drilling and trimming the snot out of the robot before we shipped.

So one of the engineering mentors goes around the robot with 2 of the students and tells them which bolts, nuts and washers to remove. After about a 1/2 hour he stood there with 2 hands FULL of "extraneous, unnecessary hardware" that weighed.....you guessed it - 3/4 of a pound. Much of it came fro the KOP frame joints where 1 fastener was just fine due to our design last year.

Assign a couple of team members to monitor the weight of everything you put on a robot. It will help you during week 6. Remember, everything weighs something (even paint).