pic: Another Cheap Wood Frame Idea

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

If you are going with dead axles, why don't you just support the axle/bolt from both sides with two chassis rails on each side of the robot chassis? This would take a lot of the stress off the single hole and spread it out between two holes.

That is another way to build the robot, and if you feel like making up a sketch or Inventor rendering of it, that would be great! It sounds like what team 173 has done in the past.

The cantilevered axle design has some advantages and some disadvantages. One advantage is that it's pretty easy to work on it, another is that the holes don't have to be aligned, another is that it saves the weight of the outer piece of wood, and since there's a bumper there anyways that piece of wood is kind of redundant. On the downside, it takes a bigger axle with a strong attachment to equal the strength of a non-cantilevered design.

We used a chassis layout almost identical to this one last season, with pultruded fiberglass C channel for the side and end rails, and sheet aluminum for the bellypan and gussets. Axles were 1/2" threaded rod with big flange nuts holding them to the fiberglass. It worked well, and we felt it was easier to work on the drivetrain with this design, than with the double-supported dead axles we used the previous two years. Also, building the chassis took less time. We are beginning to think that getting a chassis built and running quickly is a good thing, so the team can concentrate on the game-playing parts of the robot. That's one reason we are taking a lot of time playing with new chassis ideas now, hopefully we'll have enough design ideas ready to go that we can pick one and built it by the end of the first week.