pic: Swamp Thing's Sprockets

[Tytus Gerrish]

Thanks all,

The night before wathejetting i got an email that said "Watterjet confirmed" Immideately i got on autocad and thought of whatever i could do and draw for the engineers to put into the watterjet, The Eyes And the "Speedholes" are mine we were watterjetting at BTI Inc down the street from our school For SEVEN HOURS!!!!! Alot of Parts We Are SO Greatfull We Even Put BTI watterjetted into our chasis The sprockets are Real bling! i cant Give any clues as to what theyre for yet But Rest Assured It Will Be awesome

[Tytus Gerrish]

Originally Posted by Gadget470

Please all:

Do not turn this thread into an Engineer vs College vs High School debate.

That has been debated enough.
The two sides of the argument are:
HS Built) Kids learn more by doing.
Eng Built) Kids learn more by seeing things done "right".

Neither can be proven either way. Each individual is different. I've been a student on two teams. One which was 90% "Adult" designed/built, and the other which was 90% "HS Student" designed/built. I won't say which I learned more from because I am a unique person with a unique experience.

As to that specific sprocket, two retro words:
Way Cool.

I'm pretty sure Tytus designed this, as he states he drew the "Eyes" in AutoCAD "last night" from the post date. To my knowledge, Tytus is a high school senior with CAD experience. The piece was cut with a water-jet at BTI (One of 179's sponsors). So your comment about the engineer built product is irrelevent. The water-jet machine (seemingly) loads the AutoCAD file, and makes its cuts where lines are in the drawing file.

1) Was this water-jet cut piece necessary?
2) Does it look really cool?
3) Could they buy an off-the-shelf item that does the same function?
4) If so, does it really matter who manufactures the product?

1) No.
2) Yes.
3) Yes.
4) No.

Ok, brandon since you asked....

first... im a jounior, not a seinor
I didnt draw this sprocket Dan Quiggle(Prat&Whitney, Under EDF INC) Did Tho i could draw sprockets fairly easy
The eyes are my creation they are scaled down from my orignal verson witch can be seen on another piece of the Bot
YES Its Made of aluminum
Yes, It was nessarry to have them watterjetted, Unless we wanted to spend 36 man hours a sprocket on them and the alumionum sprockets weigh a half pound each compared to a steel one off the shelf would weigh 2.5 pounds
NO, you cant know what theyre for yet
Yes, The waterjet machine is awesome
NO, we cant afford one the machine, the 50HP pump, the watter softener, the abrasive sand, matinance, sound ordnance permits, ETC...
BTI Is like a sponsor they dont give us money but they let us do watterjetting and some machaning we can't do ourselves .and gave us a tour of their shop And they gave us students alot of knowledge about machaning


and Am i realy that mysterious that Breandon Speculates about me?

[Jon K.]

We are lucky enough to be making our own sprockets this year as well. We have CNC Software(Mastercam) as a sponsor this year and so we will have as many sprockets as needed. And the program isnt that hard to use. I picked it up for the most part in about 3 hours and we had our first sprocket done today. So hopefully we can make use of the tool and have things as nice as that one very soon. LOL. CNC Software also donated a CNC machine to our team and we have that at one of the high schools where we build and fabricate our machine.

[Katie Reynolds]

Originally Posted by Gui Cavalcanti

Don't assume that all CNC and milled-out pieces are engineer-designed an machinist-made. My team, for one, has a core of machinists who are trained on manual mills and lathes, with a specialized group of three people (including me) who are trained on the CNC mill. Our sponsorship from a nearby machine shop consists of them letting us use their tools, with the stipulation that they're too busy to make parts for us. All of our parts are student-designed and manufactured, but they're very high quality.

Same with team 93. Fox Valley Technical College has one of the best machine shops in the area. The students are trained in the off-season on how to use the manual and CNC machines, MasterCAM and Inventor, so when it comes time to manufacture robot parts, the students are experts in what they are doing! Thanks to this, 93 has come up with very professional looking parts, completely designed and manufactured by students.

Anyway: very cool, Tytus! Great way to lose some weight on the sprockets, as well - it looks much nicer than "swiss-cheesing" it.