We now have 130lbs on our robot and have just kept the stric basic(2 arms, shooter). We don’t know where to cut that extra 10 lbs.
What material is your robot made out of?
Also are you weighing your robot with bumbers and/or battery in? If you are take them off and you will be fine.
.Here’s some photo
well you can start drilling hole,and what mr EricLeifermann said what type of metal or material are you using, and if you have your bumpers and battery on, just remove them and you will be good
Bumper and battery are already out in the 130lbs. We are only using thin metal
well i could say if you just want to shoot, remove the arms ( if the arms are used for climbing), or if you want to climb and play defense, than remove your shooter. it which ever way you guys want to go
My first thought is to put some lightning holes in your hopper and shooter chutes, you don’t need a solid piece of metal there. Its not going to get you 10 pounds but its a start.
Also look at how many bolts and the size of bolts you are using. Do you really need what looks like 3 1/4-20 bolts to hold up 1 PVC air tank?
Since you are currently 10lbs over drilling holes is going to be difficult thats a lot of holes. I dont know if there is even room to drill that many holes from your pictures.
I would look over what materials your using, are you using a 1/2’’ plate where something much smaller could be use?
Like posted above make sure your battery and bumpers weren’t included in that weight.
Last year, we lost about 4 lbs drilling out all the holes we weren’t using on the kit frame. That’s a start. It looks like your shooter is plywood lined with (1/8"?) aluminium plate. Drill holes into anything that doesn’t contact the frisbee. You can easily shed 10 lbs with just drilling holes, don’t do anything drastic.
You could replace a lot of you nuts and bolts with lightweight rivets. I can’t see much of your pneumatic system, but if you have a lot of brass you should replace it with more plastic fittings and tubes. If your shooter has an adjustable height, you may want to consider fixing it to one position and adjusting the flywheel speed to control disk trajectory.
In the future, your tower probably doesn’t need to be as strong as you made it this year. Judging by the pictures you posted, Your tower seems to be made of the same type of stock as your drivetrain, which is overkill.
![IMG_0289[1].JPG](https://www.chiefdelphi.com/uploads/default/original/3X/0/7/0785c67fbba3d30195854dddbaeae609835f85b2.jpeg)
As said before, start by taking metal out of your feeder chute. You only need rails along the outside edges to hold the frisbees, keeping a pair of rails 2" wide while taking out sections in the middle will help. Same goes for the piece of plywood on your shooter. There is a lot of material and weight you don’t need, especially in that plywood seeing as how it is covered in a sheet of metal for the frisbee to slide against.
Look at hogging out holes in the inner frame rails. You need strength on the other rail (that forms the perimeter of the chassis) to take hits from other robots, but the inner rails that support the inside of the wheels don’t take near as much force. You could place many large holes in the vertical span of those channels and sacrifice little strength.
It’s hard to tell from the photo, but how thick is your electronics platform?
Hardware is another place. I see a couple frame joints that have 3 bolts per leg. Take out the third bolt on each leg and if it is still stiff enough, cut off the excess length from the joint (where the third bolt would have resided).
You could also try replacing the CIMs in your shooter with something smaller like a Bag of MiniCim. It won’t get you the 10 lbs, but it will help.
Have you checked this out?
Thank you, we have figured out the stuff to do for reducing the weight. We are taking out the manifold and the compressor plus some holes and cut out some piece. Queston: will we have enough air
Did you release your compressed air before weighing? That can also make a noticeable difference.
drill anything not structural and if that doesn’t help any drill more holes between those holes also look for anything not entirely necessarily and see if can removed
so in short drill holes drill holes and drill more holes
Depending on when your regional is, you have time to order lighter ones now that you can drop in during practice day of your event. You also have the withholding allowance…
This is a bit of out an out there idea but you can replace the AM kit frame corner brackets with 1/8 plate gussets. EX: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/38516 And use rivets instead of bolts.
Edit: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/38390 cad files are in this.
I know you guys are short on weight, but are your accumulators plastic?
If they are, check this out…
It may be a good idea to keep the plastic accumulators, but please see the risk involved with it.