We’ve recently been working to acquire powdercoating and anodizing sponsors, and have begun to realize that painting really does take a while. Parts have to be test assembled, cleaned, sent off to sponsors (or actually painted, if you can do that yourself), picked up, re-finished (if bearing holes or tapped holes got painted over, for example), and then re-assembled into the final assembly. Of course, this is all assuming that you never want to iterate that part of the robot ever again. I’m beginning to think that painting a fair fraction of the robot could potentially knock three to five days out of our schedule, much more than I would suspect most teams dedicate to it.
How do teams that paint much or all of their robot every year handle all this time in their scheduling? When is it typically done, how long does it typically take, and how do you make the call that an assembly works well enough as-is to be worth painting or coating? What are the logistical tricks associated with painting a robot during the season?
Finally, does anyone have any design/machining tips for parts that are meant to be powdercoated or anodized?
Our sponsor who helps us with milling and lathe work actually powdercoats for us. I’m not sure what system they use but we drop it off after school and pick it up the next morning. Pretty quick process
This is one of the reasons why we just spray paint our parts; we make our parts, take them outside, prime, and paint them, and have them back within a few hours if we’re in a real hurry. It likely beats the turnaround we would see if we powder coated. The other reason is that we haven’t really explored powder coating yet, since we have a solution for making our robot look nice already in place.
Sure, the spray paint might wear and chip and the powder coating won’t, but from a distance nobody will be able to tell the difference.
In terms of deciding whether something is worth painting; if it’s not going to be iterated, it gets painted (drivetrain, superstructure). If we think it might go through some significant changes soon, we generally hold off a bit. For example, we didn’t paint the collector until we knew it was going to work well enough for us to put it on the robot in the first place. Some parts of our robot remain unpainted, and that’s also okay with us. All we need it to do is stand out on the field and look pretty, and as long as enough of the robot is yellow and black, the painting has done its job.
Powdercoating an anodizing can take quite a bit of time out of your schedule. This is not even considering the fact that the company may not be running your color that day. However the benefits are good(sponsors really like it and it makes the robot look a lot more professional) so we continue to do it.
The biggest thing you can do to get around these negatives is a non-powdercoated practice bot. You can do all your testing and iteration on the practice bot and you do not lose any time. You then learn your mistakes and where you need to iterate. Only after all your iteration is done do you assemble the competition robot with your new knowledge. I find that anodizing is generally done on small parts so iteration on these parts isn’t as important.
For the comp bot we generally try to send stuff off to ano immediately, and send stuff off to powdercoat as soon as we have a working practice assembly(this isn’t always a rigid law. Drivetrain for example is sent off immediately. Individual parts are also sent off earlier than assemblies). Bolt patterns and planning ahead on parts that you think you will want to iterate allows this to work out pretty well.
I’ve always wanted to ship out a bunch of stock to have it anodized before we mill it. I think it would look great if for example we did all the 1x1 tube in gold while the 1x2 was done in black and in either case the weight reduction holes would really pop in the raw aluminum silver. Yes it would require being a little more careful when clamping it in the vice for milling.
Years ago one of our then students and a couple of mentors did anodize the pieces for the competition robot before final assembly. However since they built the tanks themselves and they had a problem with them leaking the mentor got frustrated and tossed all the tanks and he has since left the team.
I was always hesitant to paint or powder coat the aluminum parts of the robot. Occasionally… very occasionally, we would have to take a metal part to the machine shop at an event and ask them to weld it, or to weld something to it. Admittedly it doesn’t take long to clean paint off a part… or even powder coat… but it does take time.
Of course we had not such concerns when we made the robots out of wood. Aniline dyes and lacquer were our blingy finish!
We started powdercoating the robot in 2012 and it definitely adds ~3 days to the build process. But the result is worth it in my opinion. The whole team takes a lot of pride in a nicely finished product. The real trick is to find a powdercoater that will work with you on your timeline. Our sponsor, Classic PowderCoating, actually delivered some of our parts to us as soon as they were ready. He even ran out of gold flake while doing some of the pieces and drove to San Jose to pick up more that same day to finish the job.
Other things to consider is the 2-3 hours of filing/reaming bearing holes and such. It also adds 2-4 lbs.
Our week 6 schedule has our robot frame, wheels, and manipulator components ready to go to the powdercoater on Monday of that week. The powdercoater agrees to get it back to us no later than Thursday afternoon. We then do an all day/night session on Thursday-Friday assembling and wiring the robot to have it ready to scrimmage on Saturday (some assembly happens at the Scrimmage as well). Since we can’t do much with a robot that is at the paint shop, our programmers/drivers are busy testing code and practicing on our first unpainted robot.
We anodized our bots from 2006-2012, and we really loved the look of it. We often did 2 batches of 2 colors a piece. We were fortunate enough to have sponsors able to turn the parts around in 2-3 days. Even still, with the cleaning, prep, etc, we ended up taking 4-5 days out of the schedule to do so.
Last year we built our own powdercoating oven. It took a decent chunk of effort, but it’s been one of the best things we’ve ever done. The whole team is involved in the coating of parts, from cleaning, prepping, spraying the parts to prepping the oven and clean-up. We’re able to go from raw material to CNC to coated part assembled to a robot in a matter of hours.
If you have the means, and really want to ‘paint’ your bots, its an awesome way to keep the timeline under control.
See some of these attached photos of the oven and a batch of parts we cranked out in a single day.
Does anyone have any experience or insights into teams anodizing on their own? I’ve been doing a bit of research, and it appears to be difficult but not prohibitively so for teams to start their own anodizing setup.
We spent a good deal of time researching it, unless you have a huge surplus of labor it’s better to just get a sponsor to do it.
An entire robot’s worth of anodizing (for most teams) is only $100-200 as well (assuming just color, nothing hard plated) so it’s cheaper to just pay to get it done.
My main thought is we could get better turnaround times this way. The frame can be out for a few days for PC, but if a part has to be anoed, you generally want it pretty fast to assemble and test. Depending on the sponsor, the wit might be too long.
San Jose has a lot of anodizing shops, if you’re just looking to get something done black I’m certain you can find many with same day service.
We’ve had several places anodize for 973. All in LA, San Jose or Fresno. They drive a truck/van all the way to SLO 3 days a week. We get 2 day turnaround on everything.
My team considered anodizing/powder coating our offseason bot, and my opinion has been at odds with those of some other members, so I’ll add my two cents here.
Generally (and my view is no doubt colored by the fact that I pretty much only do design and fabrication), I abide by the motto that function follows function, and form can go fall in a furrow. I would strongly advise against any cosmetic work on a robot unless it is mechanically excellent. Two days spent on paint means two fewer days for testing and iteration. As for the sponsor argument, I’d wager that my team’s sponsors would be a bit happier if we performed well with an ugly robot than if we did poorly with a museum piece.
On the other hand, my boss, who’s kind of a sheet-metal nut, liked to say, “If it looks good, it probably works good.” If I recall correctly, I replied, “Yes, but does it work well?” To each his own.
I tried it in 2007 on 228. You’ll need to spend several hundred dollars buying a high power AC-DC power supply, as well as all the necessary chemicals and dyes. The primary chemical (and nastiest to work with) for the actual anodizing process is sulfuric acid.
It’s not a complicated process, but we never really pursued it much after initial tests because we didn’t have a high enough power AC-DC power supply, and we did not want to keep such a large volume of sulfuric acid in our build space.
What are the practical distinctions/trade-offs between anodizing and powder coating in FRC? Are they dependent on each other? Prep required? Turnaround time? Cost?
I’m thinking that we could go back to previous robots and spruce them up a bit for demo purposes/attracting new sponsors but our team has zero experience with adding color to metal parts.
Powdercoating doesn’t take us particularly long. If it would ever get in the way we don’t do it, but we usually find breaks in the team’s meeting schedule to get it done.
We have a sponsor who can turn around a decent number of parts in about a week, and we have our own gun / small oven to do smaller parts in house. We’ve also paid to have particular parts done overnight at a local auto shop.
It’s best to really nail design details in your prototype for the best looking result. Iteration often happens but it doesn’t mean you can’t paint. At the very worst you just replace a painted part with an unpainted part, not the end of the world.
We had our drive base painted over a few days while we were still finalizing what would go on top of it and how we would attach it to the robot. When the drive base was done we just threw everything together all at once instead of going bit by bit. The manipulator was pretty much done in a night and we paid to have it powdercoated during the next school day, ready to install right after school.
Powdercoating or anodizing isn’t super essential but if you find a free few days in your schedule it really isn’t that hard to fit in. We probably do way to little prep work (we don’t account for powder thickness at all in design, probably should) and it’s not very hard for us to throw it all together once it gets in. The trick is to find sponsors for slow turn around work and find cheap places to paint for quick turn around.
