How Do You Make Your Robot?

[jamie_1930]

Since the start of 2228 we've been relying mostly on the kit parts and 8020 (a prototyping building material) to build our robots, and I'm starting to see more and more problems with building this way. 8020 is a prototyping material and it allows you to make quick changes and to guesstemate a lot of things and still be able to get it right. Which at first sounds good, but I've noticed more and more that because we can do those things we've become reliant on them and we don't design as thoroughly as we should be.

So my question to the FIRST community is how do you guys build your robot, do you do what we do and use 8020 (or a similar material), do you make it out of sheet metal, if make it out of sheet metal do you send the designs out and get parts back, do you make the parts yourself, do you weld your frames out of square stock, what?

I'm trying to figure out what are some of the things we can change to improve ourselves and get an idea of what other teams are doing. The only other solution I have in mind right now is to do something similar to the Thunderchickens (217) and Robowranglers (148).

There's a poll included in this thread, but I don't think it will be able to grasp the scope of the differences between teams.