My team is trying to plan our very first west coast chasis for this season, and we haveaquestion to teams who planned such chasisses beafore. What’s the thickness of the profiles you use in your chasis?
Honestly, at this point in the season it’s pretty late to still be designing your custom chassis. I would seriously recommend considering if it’s worth it to build a custom chassis or just use a kit chassis.
That being said, we’ve made a few custom chassises (chasses? chassies?). The past few we’ve made have been 2.5mm wall thickness. This year we’re going with 2mm, with 3mm bearing block plates.
If you want any recommendations, feel free to reach out to our members. I’m sure they’d be happy to help.
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We are making ours out of 1/8" wall, but added in bearing block plates that are 1/4" (recessed and only sticks 1/8" off frame)
If you have the money, right now your team as whole would probably be better served to just buy a KOP drivetrain. You can probably pull off a custom WCD now, but it will come at the expense of the rest of your robot (the part that scores points).
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Yes!
What are your team’s objectives? Build a custom WCD? Be competitive in this year’s game? Other? Have you and your team studied (and taken notes from) this video yet?
For most teams, most of the time, they do not have the knowledge and/or resources to do everything they would like to do, at least not very well…
Build your first WCD train during the offseason. No rush, and when you inevitably screw something up, or when something doesn’t quite work the way you thought it would, you have the time to analyze why it didn’t and learn from it. This is what my team did and it worked VERY well for us. No we only do WCD.
This season just go with the KOP drive train so you can still finish on-time.
Look at 2363 triple helix video series on YouTube. They have a complete walk through of how to build the WCD chassis they use. There chassis is fairly simple to build and can be sucessful for any team from rookies to experienced veterans.
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Last year my team was able to use Vex’s VersaFrame to do our first WCD chassis and everything went fairly smoothly. Bumper mounting was a little bit of a challenge to figure out but we came up with some brackets to attach to the frame.
I teach the FLL teams that my sons and I have mentored that “when the robot is placed on the competition field, 90%, 95% and even 99% done rounds down to zero”. The ones that have taken this advice have consistently done very, very well. The FRC team I am mentoring this year is much happier with their prospect this year since they can see they are on track to being 100% done with manufacturing their chassis and at least one scoring mechanism before their first event so that they can go through a few iterations and get in some practice.
We usually design and build ours by Week 1. You can follow our entire guide here on Chief from start to finish. We are going to post our build portion in the coming weeks but we want to get the video right before we release it. While it is late to get into custom, the only thing I would say is that if you cannot get the gearbox math done and the gearboxes ordered before Friday, you should focus on other things and go with the kit. Good luck!