I’m curious how many other teams are epically overweight. We’re 30 pounds over LOL. I probably shouldn’t be lol’ing, but it is 11:52PM, I just got home from a 15 hour build session, and I find the word ‘potato’ funny.
Everyone’s been there. In 2006, on the Saturday before ship we weighed in at around 140, were about 5’4" in height, and had a cg so high it was pretty much instant flippage. Basically we had three days for a total redesign. Since then we’ve learned to budget weight starting from day 1, and have payed careful attention to how designs to develop. Call your situation a learning experience as well. 
We were 5 days ago and trimming our robot down was just about as hard as doing it in real life in a few days!!! :eek: :eek: :eek:
Quite a few hours of this gets you this. 40 lbs in 3 days!
But seriously, that doesn’t sound fun! Do you have a lot of unnecessary weight?
Yeah we think we know an easy way to trim off at least 15 pounds by changing the roller/belt system. The plastic hopper material is also heavier than is needed. I’m sure we can get it off. Our first year we were 70 pounds overweight at the start of week 6, but then we did significantly redesign the robot that year. The problem for us is we have to use all the CIM motors, they are heavy. Note to self: always assume you have to use all the CIMs for your robot when planning. Besides, I need something to hole saw during the regional 
Oh and our crate is overweight too, with hte robot inside with nothing else IF it weights 120lbs, we have 20lbs of weight left before hitting 400lbs… ROFL. Have to use our crate from last year.
Best thing to do is design initially with weight in mind…you’ll learn that soon enough.
We’re 120.0 right now and finished w/o making any weight mods. Will trim it down a bit just to leave a bit of room for different things if we feel the need.
Well I’m a senior so I won’t be on the team next year, but I’ll be sure to make sure the mentors remember. We always over engineer everything.
Oh and we will be at the Sussex practice regional tomorrow (later today? LOL) so I hope other teams can have helpful suggestions. I wish I had more pics to post right now, but we were too busy to take any.
Yep. 330 found out how hard it is to remove a lot of weight back in 1998, when they got to their first event (the Nationals–back then, you didn’t have to qualify) and found that they were 26# over. After that, we decided that we didn’t want to do that again.
Since then, we’ve managed weight. We know what gets hit first, and what comes off first. 2007: projections for the ramps and armor put the robot about 5-15# over. Somebody came up with a pretty good idea: the ramps are going to be protection anyway, so why do we have the armor? We wound up with only about 1-2# over, so we took off one ramp to deal with it temporarily. Wound up removing a duplicate motor, but we came in at weight.
I’ll never forget the weighing in at one of our two regionals in 07… The scale read 120.0 then 120.1 and kept switching back and forth. Then the head inspector says, “Well, they don’t say how long it has to be 120.0 lbs!”
Only had to remove a few shavings. 
Contrary to how things usually go, for once we might be adding weight to the base of our robot this year.
WHAAAT!!! We NEVER do that!!!
pre2002–don’t know personally, other than 1998
2002–hole-riddled
2003–left as-is; we only had a few ounces
2004–barely made it, and didn’t have many places for holes
2005–See the wedges for the evidence
2006–ditched a mechanism and barely made it
2007–see above
2008–No idea (I was in SD or with another team all season)
Don’t worry man, this was our robot in our rookie year 2 days before ship. Turns out we were about 40 pounds overweight as well (actually about 30 when we realized we forgot to take out the battery), but we managed to get it all together before the end of ship. Our best methods of losing weight were to remove some drive motors, replace some thick aluminum bars with thinner stuff, and of course cheese holing well into the night (literally!)
Best of luck, I’m sure that you guys can get it done!
We are currently overweight, but we can shave off twenty pounds with a quick drill ( 2 pounds over).Wink Wink.
5 oz. overweight.
Trim the zip-ties?
This is the first year we have ever been UNDERWEIGHT. Minus our 1/16th Lexan Covering, we are at 100lbs flat, the finished robot… We weighed the entire roll of Lexan we will be using and that still will only take us to 106, and we’re only using about a 1/2 of the roll anyways!
Maybe we can scrounge up all the parts we’ve had to remove in the past to make weight, and use them for ballast this year. 
As of tonight my team is about 30 pounds underweight we have nothing else to add so we are looking for ways to add weight.
umm… we’ve had weight problems in the past but this year we managed an epic in weighing. we were 40 LBS UNDERWEIGHT!!! that’s right, we weighed 80 pounds at prototype. we considered what to do with the extra weight, some ideas that were thrown around:
- a toaster
- boombox for metallica
- a vice clamp (the idea was that we wouldn’t have to carry it onto the field)
- full sets of plate armor or chain mail (too heavy)
- various limbs of team members.
yeah, fun day.
112.6 lbs
Anyone have 6 lbs of lightening hole chips we can use? 
3 days ago, we were 30 pounds under weight, and projected ourselves at finishing up at around 110 lbs.
Yesterday at noon, we weighed our robot, and we came in at 120 lbs without everything on board.
This morning, at 12:15 AM, we weighed ourselves again and came in at 110.5 lbs without a couple components, meaning we think we can make weight.
Take a good look at your design and you will be surprised how easily you can get weight off, we got 10 pounds off in 5 hours yesterday.
If you’re really desperate for big weight savings start looking at places that you doubled up motors. I know last year we weighed in a 120.1 - 120.0 all season and if worse came to worse we could’ve always pulled the extra CIM out of our drive.
And if you’re really desperate, start trimming those bolts! I know on our 'bot we could lose a half pound easy if we cut the excess threads off of every bolt.