Need help, Titanium / Carbon Fiber / Aluminum

[Jon Jack]

From experience, I'm going to have to agree with Dave Lavery about titanium. It's not as hard to work with as some may think... We made two additional forks that help us grab on to the ball during one of the fix-it windows. These two forks are made of titanium tubing and are bent to shape and welded. Our welder said that it welded really nice and gave him no trouble at all. As for bending it, it was no more difficult to do than bending steel tubing.

As David Brinza said our forks are made of carbon fiber (pics are being uploaded to CD media as I'm typing this). In 2006 we used CF rods that we bought online and were breaking them every match or two.

This year we had the forks custom molded, with the help of a sponsor. We started off with a foam model of the forks. The foam models were hand shaped using a band saw, grinder and a sander. From there two fiberglass molds were created and the CF was laid inside the molds. After being laid out a thin epoxy coat was applied to the outside.

There was some tweaking done to strengthen the forks. In the picture that I uploaded to CD media they are completely hollow on the inside. We ran a small rib along the outer edge to increase its rigidity. This set weight 9oz and was rammed into steel I-Beams, through dry wall, twisted them in the over pass and even lifted the robot on several occasions during testing. The set survived all of our qualification matches in San Diego. One of the forks did break during the quarter finals, but since we molded a second set we were able to replace it with in a couple of minutes.

In the second set we molded we foam filled them and then milled pockets to take out some of the weight. This set weighs over a pound, and has received just as much abuse as the first set.

The third set that we molded are similar to the first set, but we increased the rib size and added another couple layers of CF. This set survived all of the LA regional.

In conclusion I think that Dragon Ninja is correct about carbon fiber... Don't use it unless you have the ability to make multiple sets. There is definitely a weight benefit to using it (we weighed 107 and 112lbs at the San Diego Regional and LA Regional Respectively, not that all of that was a result of carbon fiber), but do be prepared to replace those parts at some point during the season.