Weight Reduction

[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!)