pic: 3/4" Plywood Frame

[Gdeaver]

Plywood is mother nature's composite. If you add in some epoxy and glass, Kevlar or carbon fiber cloth, you can make a very light and durable wood structure. Our team this year is contemplating making our bottom electronics board out of 5mm birch plywood laminated on both sides. The panel in our design is also a structural part of the frame. To keep the weight down requires vacuum bagging. We could buy other material for this part or buy pre made panels. I'm going to work with the students laminating the panel to give them some exposure to composite construction. There are many good tutorials on the web showing how to do this. However it does take some practice. It wood be a good off season project. You don't want to decide to do this during build season with out some practice. Allot of FRC teams are addicted to metal. They should get some fiber in their robot diet.