Painting

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

We've thought about putting finish on the aluminum frame components, but are worried that if we ever needed to do an emergency welding job at the competition that removing the paint/powder coat would slow things down.

That actually just reminded me of another type of material finish that looks good on FRC robots (and would be perfect for your situation).

Wirebrushing/Buffering:
Start off with a fine grit buffer or rotary wire brush, and with either an angle grinder or a hand drill and go to town. If you are doing it by hand, a random pattern looks the best. Although if you have a milling machine and want a pattern, put a really fine wire brush in there, and come down and make circles on your part every X inches to make a regular pattern.

[Katie_UPS]

First hand; anodizing looks amazing!

We painted our bumbers but thats it.
I think your painting idea really depends on what type of paint....

[SEA]

We have our robot anodized.

One of our sponsors is a local machine shop, and when they get their customer's parts anodized black or gold, they will add our parts to the mix. I think anodizing looks really cool, but you have be careful because the shiny metal really shows up if you scrape deep (we had to sand everything before anodizing). We didn't have a problem with scratches .

[=Martin=Taylor=]

We love to "anodize" parts on team 100 (wink wink )

The process costs about $1.50 and takes about five minutes (depending on the size of the part). It requires no sponsors, experience, or any skills of any sort

1) Buy a large quantity of sharpies in the desired color

2) Round up a large group of unemployed freshmen

3) Apply markers to any aluminum part

4) Walla = annodiziation

If the annodization is scraped off... repeat process

[David Guzman]

We have painted our robots every year since 2005. We use car paint and it looks great. It does scratch easily but is not too bad, usually the 'battle scars" look good.

We have also done wire brushing to the aluminum before. Here are 2 pictures showing our paint and wire brushing on the 2007 robot, there aren't any good ones of the 2008 robot but it was actually better than this.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/27927

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/26923

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII

We love to "anodize" parts on team 100 (wink wink )

Team 604 has used this technique a lot too! and it works great! (see the banner on this page: http://www.lelandrobotics.com/Quixilver/ The QUIXILVER on our robot is sharpied in.)

We've also anodized parts on our robot, but mainly the wheels.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/26323
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/24249

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by christina_omg

..our team kind of goes by the rule if it looks pretty it doesn't work well.

of course there are always exceptions to this but for the most part our little rule has been right...

I'm not sure about that one.

[waialua359]

Painted vs unpainted.
I think there's a difference.

http://www.waialuarobotics.com/image...b16/action.jpg

http://www.waialuarobotics.com/image...eb10/robot.jpg

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

That actually just reminded me of another type of material finish that looks good on FRC robots (and would be perfect for your situation).

Wirebrushing/Buffering:
Start off with a fine grit buffer or rotary wire brush, and with either an angle grinder or a hand drill and go to town. If you are doing it by hand, a random pattern looks the best. Although if you have a milling machine and want a pattern, put a really fine wire brush in there, and come down and make circles on your part every X inches to make a regular pattern.

Yes, I should have mentioned that we do go for some "natural" finishes, mostly just polishing, however. We've got one team member, who I'll call "Mr. Bling" who is the king of the polishing wheel. We've got lots of shiny aluminum on our machine.

We've also worked with bead blasting for a matte finish, and on our mini-sumo robots that we make in class we'll even mask off the area to be blasted so that we can polish, then mask and blast to get nice graphics without painting.

Jason

P.S. Art... was going to +ve rep you for that great post with all the images earlier on, but have to share some around first.

[erikab]

Originally Posted by EricH

60, 254, 968, 330, 1717, 365, 148, 217, 233, 118, 1538, 1902, 234, 100... I'm not done yet, and these teams are pretty good, to say the least.

Since EricH brought our team up (Team 1717), I thought I would speak a little to how our team managed to both "look good" and "work well" this year.

We set aesthetics as one of our design priorities at the beginning of the season, which meant we had to work especially hard to have all of the parts ready in time to send them to be black or gold anodized before ship date. We built and analyzed a prototype robot so that we had greater confidence that we would not have to make many changes to our final, anodized robot.

[bigbeezy]

we had our bot powder coated. This year we actually got a flat/textured finish which imo looks better than gloss, on our bot anyway. A textured finish hides flaws and such a lot better than gloss. It really takes a lot to scratch powder coating. We have 3" of coated metal of our frame that is exposed (no bumper covering) and we figured that there would be no paint left, but after 2 regionals and champs there are only minimal scratches. If you are able to get your 'bot powder coated, do. it'll be totally worth it. and if there are any changes to be made you could always spray paint it the same color, may not be a nice but from a distance no one would know.

Also scrapes and dings make for good stories of how your 'bot fought hard on the field.

[AndyB]

I've learned from experience that spray bombing does not hold up the greatest. Has anyone tried machinery spray paint like the stuff that is sold at Menards? Does it scratch just as easily?