Anodizing

[sgreco]

Originally Posted by abrown128

So its essentially insignificant. I'm looking into this for swerve parts. I guessing that these pieces wouldn't cost very much to anodize and an anodizing service could do this in a short amount of time.

Anodizing small things is easy, frames and such are kind of a pain. My team had our swerve module done in 2 days. Since they were small, we said "next time you do gold, throw this in," and they did. It isn't much of a cost to them if they're doing the color anyway, and if it's small, it's usually pretty easy.

[Kevin Kolodziej]

1675 has a local place that offers their services for free. We've done the main lift pieces on the robot one year and parts for awards last year. It all depends on if we have pieces made in time or not, and the year we got the lift done, we just happened to have a blizzard the day it was finished, so not only did we lose the 4 days for anodizing, we lost 2 days for snow! Horrible timing!!

[dirkleton]

What are the material benefits rather than aesthetics? Does anodizing help with structural strength or durability enough to make a difference for our robots?

[Fe_Will]

Originally Posted by dirkleton

What are the material benefits rather than aesthetics? Does anodizing help with structural strength or durability enough to make a difference for our robots?

Hard anodizing is quite useful for parts that are going to be taking a beating. We had our Geneva drive hard anodized and it held up quite well. Without doing it I'm sure it would have failed mid-season due to galling.