I thought about how cool our robot would look if we painted it. And then i realized how bad it would look at the end of the season. We’re always adding new parts on. Taking things off that don’t work. Redisinging. Not only would the mix-and-match look terrible. But i look at all the scratches on the robot and i realize that about 40-50% of the paint woul be scratched off. It would look like it went through hell and back.
Take a look at some teams who have painted their bots, and ask them how they do it. Some examples come to mind: 254, 233, and others. I know 254 uses powder coating, which isn’t exactly painting, but the same goal is achieved. Besides, as long as you do your CAD work before building, you shouldn’t need to make last minute changes, right? 
paint the bot, make it look cool.
then when the season is over you can demo it somewhere and use it to tell a story of your team experience by using the bot as a visual aid.
Instead of painting it, Fondy Fire creates side panels for our robot, which provides places for our sponsors and creativeness to be expressed. The panels are so light, that weight is not an issue. Here’s a picture of our 2007 + 2008 robots.
They look very cool.
oh, btw, here’s the business that of which we get them printed at. (It’s very nice of him to allow us to use the machines…:P) He also allows us to print our banners in our pit.
yes, we use powder coating on the larger parts such as our frame, elevator and carriage assembly. however, most of the smaller parts are anodized
i like to think of them as improvements, rather than changes
Actually, our 2008 robot still looks good and mostly scratch free (at least it did at championships-who knows what pink’s done with it since)
You’d be surprised actually. I believe 330 paints their robots, after Atlanta their robots still look good. I’d still prefer powder coating or anodizing over painting though.
Powder coating is where they blast a part(s) to get a new, clean layer of aluminum. Afterwards they spray and epoxy based powder on the part(s) and then bake the epoxy in an oven. The end result is a nice, glossy finish to the part(s). While it’s easy to get small micro scratches on the surface, it is pretty resilient to major scratches. We’ve powder coated both our '07 and '08 competition robots and after the season’s over you can’t really see the scratches unless you’re examining the robot up close.
We spray paint everything (except extrusion) onour robot either MOE Green or Black. We don’t have the equipment in shop for powder coating (although we could probably send parts off to have it done). The paint holds up very well, especially since bumpers have become the norm. Our primary spares are usually painted, as well as any Fix It Upgrades. Even in the MOEhawk year when we routinely broke the wings, we had tons of panted spares. In previous years when the paint has scratched, we have touched it up with Sharpies and nail polish.
I wish more teams would paint/powder coat their robots. Bumpers and side panels are great for adding color but there is something special about seeing a robot that is saturated with color. It stands out and becomes part of the team identity. It gets a little monotonous watching a bunch of bare aluminum robots driving around (especially before bumpers).
“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” - Buckminster Fuller
I love this quote, as it perfectly sums up my design philosophy. However, I define “beautiful” in the scope of engineering as to mean not only cosmetic eye-candy, but also an incredibly efficient or minimalist solution. A Segway is a beautiful machine, the Millau Viaduct is a beautiful bridge, the Audi TT is a beautiful car.
You’d be surprised at how easy it is to make your robot look a lot better with only what I call the “extra 10%” - if you are going to do something, then put the extra 10% effort in up front and make it work right and look good the first time.
Here are a list of ways to make your robots look much better:
Spray Painting:
While spray paint on any exposed metal surfaces can and will scratch easily, on plastics (especially polycarbonate), spray painting on the inside face works really well. You can also do layered painting to make color gradients; and by masking off parts of the Lexan you can do all kinds of nice paint schemes.
If you are going to spray paint any metal parts, be sure to sandblast them first if you can. This will remove all kinds of grime and impurities from the surface, and it’ll provide a good base to start off of.
http://www.team228.org/gallery/61/slideshow/weeksix-083.jpg](http://www.team228.org/media/pictures/view/2898)
Sandblasting:
Once you are done machining all those aluminum parts, wash with acetone and sandblast 'em. When you are done sandblasting, wash them a second time with acetone and then spray them with a clear coat to protect the nice sandblasted finish.
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/5632/sandblastinglu9.jpg
Vinyl Cutter:
Design your team and sponsor logos in any vector-editing program (such as Adobe Illustrator), and export them to the application which controls your vinyl cutter. From here, you can have the vinyl cutter basically cut out huge stickers in the shape of your vector files which you can stick to anything flat. Polycarbonate is a good choice for vinyl.
http://www.team228.org/gallery/60/slideshow/bds-20.jpg](http://www.team228.org/media/pictures/view/2789)
Plotter:
If you prefer Photoshop over Illustrator, then design large side panels for your robot using any image editing program of your choice. Then with a wide-format plotter, print them out. From here, either you can laminate the panels (I suggest the thickest possible lamination, as the thin ones can easily tear on FRC robots), or glue them to the inside of thin polycarbonate sheet.
http://www.team228.org/gallery/64/slideshow/S4300449.jpg](http://www.team228.org/media/pictures/view/3082)
Powder Coating:
This is my personal favorite - so much so this summer I’m building my own powder coating oven (3’ wide x 2’ high x 6’ long - e.g. large enough to do full-length arm/elevator or a complete welded robot frame) for powder-coating parts in-house. Powder coating is simple: clean the parts really well (sandblasting works), spray the electro-static powder onto them, then cook them in an oven to cure the powder.
It’s safe, environmentally friendly, and the finished parts are moderately scratch resistant. The only real downside to powder coating is that it typically adds about 0.003" to all parts, although you can “block off” sections of the finished machined parts to prevent powder from going into bearing holes and the like.
http://www.team228.org/gallery/58/slideshow/bds-45.jpg](http://www.team228.org/media/pictures/view/2671)
Anodize:
Anodizing is a great way to protect your parts and have them look sweet in the process. I wouldn’t suggest doing this in-house, unless you have a chemistry teacher involved with your team, as I wouldn’t really recommend storing the kinds of chemicals involved here in your robotics shop/lab/classroom. Anodizing is a chemical process in which the parts are first cleaned, then etched in a caustic solution, then desmet, then anodized in sulfuric acid, then dyed in the color, then sealed in a heated solution.
Anodizing typically adds up to 0.001" onto the parts.
Powder Coating for the win!
We would never go back to anything else.
No anodizing in Hawaii, so havent really explored that yet.
We are looking into chroming.
254 has shown that it can look cool!
…our team kind of goes by the rule if it looks pretty it doesn’t work well.
of course there are always exceptions to this but for the most part our little rule has been right…
We use Tie Dye over thin lexan panels for the robot and then Tie Dye (paint)the bumper material before assembling the bumpers.
330’s trademark color scheme for the past several years has been to have blue “fixed” parts, like the frame, and bright yellow “moving” parts like gripper claws or arms. When possible we blue anodize the frame and related parts. But if time presses or it will cost too much to anodize (one of our sponsors pays for it), then we have a very similar color of spray paint that we use. The yellow is always spray painted.
We have learned over the years that it really takes very little extra time to paint our parts. The last bit of a build session is used to prep parts to be painted. Painting is the last thing we do before locking up. The parts are allowed to dry overnight and through the next day. When we come back to the shop the next evening, the parts are dry and ready to install and we’ve missed out on most of those lovely paint fumes.
We have also done the bit about fancy painting on the inside of the plastic covers, but the robot looks more professional when the frame is painted or anodized. So we paint the frame and the covers too.
With the advent of required bumpers, we really don’t loose too much paint anymore, so the robots don’t look all beat up. I highly recommend having some sort of finish on your robot, other than plain aluminum.
We like to use either varnish or sanding sealer, perhaps some Danish Oil, a bit of aniline dye…
We’ve thought about putting finish on the aluminum frame components, but are worried that if we ever needed to do an emergency welding job at the competition that removing the paint/powder coat would slow things down.
Jason
Stroker McGurk* used to say, “If it don’t go, chrome it!” Same thing. That’s the philosophy of my 55 chevy. But with robots, it seems that most of the good looking ones actually work very well…because it takes a lot of planning, good design, and excellent construction techniques to build a good looking robot, and teams that have that ability generally also know how to make robots that work well.
*Stroker McGurk was a cartoon character drawn by Tom Medley, he appeared in Hot Rod magazine all thru the early years
60, 254, 968, 330, 1717, 365, 148, 217, 233, 118, 1538, 1902, 234, 100… I’m not done yet, and these teams are pretty good, to say the least. 1114 has a different method of looking pretty, namely, stock aluminum that works like a dream.
If the exceptions outnumber the rule, it’s time for a new rule. Oh, and the logical corollary is: If it doesn’t look pretty, it does well. This is not the case. I would say that your team is an exception, not a rule.
One note on 330–it has happened that the color scheme is reversed. Sometimes when that happened, a coat of clear anodize was applied before the yellow paint. We also liked to keep the painting area away from the work area by about 50 feet or more.
That actually just reminded me of another type of material finish that looks good on FRC robots (and would be perfect for your situation).
Wirebrushing/Buffering:
Start off with a fine grit buffer or rotary wire brush, and with either an angle grinder or a hand drill and go to town. If you are doing it by hand, a random pattern looks the best. Although if you have a milling machine and want a pattern, put a really fine wire brush in there, and come down and make circles on your part every X inches to make a regular pattern.
http://www.team228.org/gallery/50/slideshow/utc-020.jpg](http://www.team228.org/media/pictures/view/2263)
First hand; anodizing looks amazing!
We painted our bumbers but thats it.
I think your painting idea really depends on what type of paint…
We have our robot anodized.
One of our sponsors is a local machine shop, and when they get their customer’s parts anodized black or gold, they will add our parts to the mix. I think anodizing looks really cool, but you have be careful because the shiny metal really shows up if you scrape deep (we had to sand everything before anodizing). We didn’t have a problem with scratches 
.
We love to “anodize” parts on team 100 (wink wink ;))
The process costs about $1.50 and takes about five minutes (depending on the size of the part). It requires no sponsors, experience, or any skills of any sort
-
Buy a large quantity of sharpies in the desired color
-
Round up a large group of unemployed freshmen
-
Apply markers to any aluminum part
-
Walla = annodiziation
If the annodization is scraped off… repeat process
We have painted our robots every year since 2005. We use car paint and it looks great. It does scratch easily but is not too bad, usually the 'battle scars" look good.
We have also done wire brushing to the aluminum before. Here are 2 pictures showing our paint and wire brushing on the 2007 robot, there aren’t any good ones of the 2008 robot but it was actually better than this.