6 wheel drive with chain tensioners and shifting

[548swimmer]

Originally Posted by Edoc'sil

Ya, ideally I would use 5/16 or 1/4, but we don't have it and off season projects are on a shoestring budget. Dropping the plate to 1/4 would save me 3.2 lbs if I left it with as many holes in it as I do currently, but that would be to weak. Likely I could shave off 2 lbs by doing thinner material and triangular cutouts.

If 45 lbs is considered heavy the women of our shop are quite obese

Are you sure it would be too weak? I recommend running stress analysis on one side of the frame, using the wheels for your fixed constraints. Put 300lbf on the outer plate and see what happens.

Since this is for off season, go ahead and use what you have, I understand completely. We're currently working on an old bot using the IFI control system because its what we have around. As previously stated, switch the 80-20 out for 1"x1" with 1/16 wall square tubing. You can mount it to the sides with threaded inserts pressed into the tube. My team usually uses 1/8" thick wall and to mount things on to the tube we just use a bolt. I'm not sure how well 1/16" wall would hold up to this though. Again, I wouldn't be too concerned about implementing these suggestions if it's only a off season robot.