Weight Reduction

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by MattB703

Another thing to keep in mind;

If the component that you designed is still strong enough after you have drille the cheese out of it, it is possible that you could have just used thinner material to start with.

Not always. If a team uses 1/4in Alu. for the frame and cheeses it, it might be stronger than say, solid 1/8in Alu. it also depends on the structural rigidity as a whole.

If you swiss the frame and it doesn't seem to be affected, you'll be sadly wrong the first time some other team's robot meets your frame up close and in person.

Originally Posted by AJ R

Our robot last year was allmost all pollycarbonate. We were more than 40 pounds overweight. We spent week 5 and thursday of our first competion drilling the holes in the frame larger, trimming corners off of pieces and many speed holes. 3 in hole saw works well but this year we have acess to even larger ones. My advice - allways keep weight into consideration.

That is one of, if not, the coolest looking robot I've seen. You should have had LED's at the bottom (red and blue) and changed the color based on what alliance you were on then frosted the whole robot. You could change the color of your bot on a whim.

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

Adding some fiber to your robot can work wonders for weight.

Adding does not take weight off. Replacing does. If you make something out of plywood, it'll be heavy. If you make it out of Carbon fiber and Aluminum, it'll be much lighter.

Originally Posted by maltz1881

Just as a funny story although it wasn't funny then. When i was with a now defunct team we had an engineer who insisted we had to use 1/4 in thick aluminum for our sides. This was several years ago when you could only weight 130 with your battery. I told him many times it wasn't necessary to go with something so heavy. He still insisted. When we finished the robot we weighed it and came in at a whooping (are you sitting down!!) 217 lbs . What could I say other then I told you so which of course I didn't. Shaking my head and handing out the sawzalls we made it down finally to 130 on the dot. It only took us 9 days of making swiss cheese out of EVERYTHING. Needless to say that engineer was never seen nor heard from again.

Heh. I see no problem with 1/4in Aluminum for frames, but then again, I've only been in FIRST for a year now so...

Originally Posted by Cuog

Programmers: Get rid of that White space, no comments. Those extra electrons are killing us

file everything smooth, I havent teste4d it but im sure of you filed everything on the robot to a smooth surface almost a half pound of dust would be removed.

Filing? Half a pound? Are you crazy?

Filing will do more than make it flat. Filing will take more off. Lapping would make it perfectly flat (assuming you're using 2000 grit or better). However, I severely doubt that all the alu. you will file off will even be close to a half pound. A quarter, hell, even an eighth of a pound, maybe. But a half? no.