Using wood on a robot

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by scaryone

Use Baltic Birch plywood. Advantages often outweigh aluminum. Wood will bend without breaking and bounce back into shape (of course to a limit). We often feel that wood weight vs strength makes birch superior. Also, so darn easy to work with. Over 80 matches last year (and some really rough ones) and the bot looks like it did on bag and tag day.

Riot crew always builds such sweet (wooden) machines.

[philso]

Originally Posted by lopsided98

Yes, wood is a perfectly good material. There are some teams that make almost all of their robot out of wood.

The wood PWM wires are really slick! The color coding was from the three different types of tropical hardwood used.

[Joe Ross]

We used a wood claw in 2007. That robot won 2 regionals, made it to Einstein, won a regional quality award and a regional and championship Industrial Design award. The claw was also featured in the 2007 behind the design book. http://www.amazon.com/FIRST-Robots-R...ind+the+design

[techhelpbb]

http://blog.kidrobot.com/product-pre...wooden-bender/

...the way nature intended

Laminated wood is plenty strong and if there is any doubt; many of you are probably reading this while sitting on a floor supporting your weight on plywood.

One could argue, depending on the scope of the analysis, wood is actually more ecologically friendly. When you consider the way you get your aluminum, steel and plastic and trace it all the way back to the trees, mines and oil wells. Course wood gets a lot less ecofriendly if you use commerical fertilizers.

[2508electronics]

We use wood as a base and a panel for the electronics all the time. Also, we do what we call "aluminizing" the wood to all of the piece which basically means spray paint it an aluminum color. That gets interesting during inspections occasionally. Last year the inspector went to test continuity to make sure the frame wasn't being used as a ground and put one of the multimeter probes on the "aluminized" wood base and was surprised when we told him it was wood.

[MrRoboSteve]

Wood this year:

spacer inside 1" square aluminum tubing
spacer inside manipulator mechanism
component of manipulator

Previously:

electrical panel

[z_beeblebrox]

Originally Posted by MrRoboSteve

Wood this year:

spacer inside 1" square aluminum tubing
spacer inside manipulator mechanism
component of manipulator

Previously:

electrical panel

Wood this year:

Robot