Stengthening Wood

[neoshaakti]

Our robot is less than an inch off the ground, and we are using plywood poles of 1.4 inches by 1.4 inches in order to create a hopper (our hopper starts 42 inches off the ground, and conforms to the robot's max dimensions of 28 by 38). The poles of plywood in my opinion are very vulnerable to breaking, and the structure as a whole probably will not be sturdy enough and crumple as a result of any contact with our robot outside of the bumper zone.

How do you think we should go about strengthening our structure?

I have a few ideas myself:

1. We use steel perforated L stock from McMaster and attach it to the wood beams.

2. We buy steel square perforated tubing from McMaster and use L's, deck screws and bolts to attach the rest of the hopper to the steel perforated support beams.

3. We buy aluminum square stock, aluminum square hollow tubing and rivet/screw the faces of the square hollow tubing to block of aluminum stock... the only problem with this is it takes a lot of time to do (relatively)

I wish I had a picture to attach to this thread, unfortunately I did not bring my camera last night

Thank you for your time