I believe the material is 5 gage aluminum sheet. But your point is still valid.
I’m not sure, they show it welded to steel sheet in the drawings, no?
Another point of confusion.
No, it’s steel. They screwed up that part of the drawing too. The assembly drawing makes it clear it’s a weldment and refers to it as “steel bump”.
Next year’s game will be building robots to read field drawings and go out and verify the actual field against them. Then the field not matching the drawings will be entirely by design.
An error in the field drawings? Say it ain’t so!
I’m surprised with this update that the material wasn’t addressed also. Does anyone know if that is a question already submitted?
I think it’s pretty obviously steel. The mention of aluminum makes absolutely no sense and steel is explicitly called out in 2 different locations in the assembly drawing.
I have been told the field elements where originally aluminium and got changed to steel when they found out the cost.
It is a tad ironic to back up a statement by citing a drawing in a thread about how the drawings are wrong.
Didn’t they say they were steel in the field tour videos?
Has anybody altered their wall yet and made an effort to determine what effect exactly is incurred by the change?
Rock Wall will be 5.25 wide because of manufacturing limitations per Frank’s blog. Height per drawing. 4.5?
Please refer to Page 148 of the 2016FieldComponents.pdf
The Rock Wall is 4.625" tall overall relative to the platform, it is 4.50" if you are not counting the thickness of the material that makes up the base flanges.
So it will be 4.625" Tall and 5.25" Wide at Competition.
I was going off the game manual dimensions which shows 4.5. I agree the detail drawing would make it 4.63" Assuming the part was made to the drawing which apparently it wasn’t. The same drawing shows the material to be 5 gauge Aluminum which is .182 thick which will make it 4.68. I guess we will same what it really is on game day. Sort of reminds my of the British & Italian sports cars of the 60s which where made out of whatever was in the parts bin that day. :]
I’m trying to temper my frustrations by knowing that this probably doesn’t ruin my team’s robot or anything like that, and that FIRST didn’t seem to have any good options here. They’re doing what they can do now to fix it. But it’s just such an amateurish mistake to make.
Does FIRST just not inspect their parts? Surely when someone got the part and measured it, they were comparing the measurement to a number written on some kind of drawing somewhere. They just don’t verify dimensions against prints? Or they released the wrong print? What gives?
And the geometry of a 4.5" wide hat section isn’t exactly rocket science for a supplier to make either. Dozens of teams have made their own without incident.
I guess I’m just venting. There’s nothing else that can be done.
While you’re probably right, it was also “obviously” 4.5 inches wide too…
I’ll agree on that. It’s not like it’s different from the 4" hat sections for 2012. I could probably walk out to our shop and have the fab guys knock them out in a few hours. Heck, there’s enough fabricating resources in all of FRC that HQ could probably put out a request and get the parts donated to them by a team or teams in less time than going through their current supplier.
Hey mistakes happen, especially in the manufacturing and design industry (quite often in fact). But I’m glad to see they released their rationale and the behind the scenes decisions that led to their choice. Luckily tho this change I can’t really see hurting any team at all, cause if anything its much easier to not get stuck on the rock wall now.
Please look at the updated version of the 2016FieldComponents.pdf, they have the drawing with the dimensions as you will see at competition.
In the context of the entire field it’s pretty safe to assume the drawing is right in this regard. You can’t weld aluminum to steel and every baseplate for every defense is steel.
You would bring that process up… That’s my day job. (OK, I don’t deal with welding aluminum to steel, period. But we do deal with lots of aluminum.)
That being said, I do believe I’ve seen some PLASTIC welded to steel by the same process.