What are your hooks made of?

My team has yet to decide what material we are going to use for our climbing hook and I was wondering what other teams have decided to use.

I’ve seen metal and plastic (presumably polycarbonate) hooks. Teams with translating climbers have a wheeled trolley. The most stupidly simple idea I’ve seen is Robonauts’ Everybot, which uses a chopped up carabiner.

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My team is using half inch lexan heated and reshaped

We are using 1/8in or 1/4in aluminum, I don’t remember.

Not fully sure what we are doing but odds are it will be layers of laser cut plywood lamented together the same we used in 2018 and might modify for a posible auto level

We thought about using rebar. Is that lame?

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Vinyl coated steel. It appears that the weight ratings are based on the tear out of the fasteners. I stuck a big screwdriver through one of the holes, put the hook on some metal framing and picked myself off the floor (195 lb). Other students were able to do the same. The observers didn’t notice any significant flexing of the hook.

Polylactic acid

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1/8" 6061 Aluminum Plate.

I bought some 1/4 x 1" aluminum strap today, to make hooks from. We made a sample from some used metal a couple weeks ago, it looks like it could work. Pretty easy to bend around a 1.5ish inch OD round thing, to get it to about the right shape, as long as you have a vise to clamp it in.

We went for 5mm (approximately 1/5") aluminum plates. It seems good enough so far.

If dimensions aren’t super important to you, then I would recommend a cots bike hook from any hardware store. Very very durable

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Ours are currently delrin covered in surgical tubing, but we’ll likely switch over to aluminum or polycarbonate before week 1

1/4" polycarbonate with stand-offs. So far so good, but we’ll swap over to aluminum if it shows us any sign of not being strong enough. I don’t anticipate that happening.

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We are planning to use this:

Vinyl-Coated Hook, Heavy Duty, 1-1/8" Wide x 5-1/2" High x 2-1/2" Deep Overall

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We are using two of these 6 inches apart currently.
Zoro Hook

We are using 2 peices of aluminum with a chunk of neoprene sandwitched inbtween the two peices becuase my janky idea of just wrapping surgical tubing was a bad idea apparently.

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Currently our hooks are made of imagination.

But in past years we’ve used PLA sandwiched between aluminium plates to great success.

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We’re using multiple hooks made of thick laser cut polycarbonate.

Polycarb. As a general rule on our team, any part of the robot that has to be run into a field element is polycarb. We’ve got some grip tape wrapped around the contact point to keep from sliding around on the bar.

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Milled aluminum trolley wheels. The drilled out holes are for, depending on your perspective, extra grip on the pipe, desparate attempts to get down to 125 pounds, or just because they look cool.

5826

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