Metal thicknesses and recommendations for spinner proofing

[daveimi]

Hi All

I've nearly finished our little wooden robot but it's not really for spinner-fighting its mostly just for some of the other non spinner events. I'm looking to build another out of Aluminium now that I've found my feet with it all.

The design I'm looking at is a dozer blade with some Dewalt drive. I want to fold a single piece of ally into a blade with three angles, and wondered how thick I would have to go to put up with 720, NST, drumroll, boner, LS4 and so on.

I will get a welded steel blade if needs be, but would rather stay with ally if I can as I find it a lot easier to work with. For steel I'm guessing people will say 3mm hardox and so on.

Cheers, Dave

[Ellis]

I'll let others with more experience give stone advice, but it would depend on grade I suppose. You'd have to go pretty bloody thick to be as impenetrable as 3.2mm/4mm Hardox, or very thick steel, to the point where working it in the average shed gets complicated.

I find as a rule of thumb, if you can bend it with basic workshop tools (hammer/vice etc) then it's not strong enough.

[daveimi]

Ok no worries

[plargen]

i would go for 5mm hardox to be safe as the 5mm mild steel scoop on scruffy got bent (can post a pic later if you want )
8mm t6 aluminium would probably work but you would need a ti or hardox blade as aluminium isn,t good at keeping a blade

[daveimi]

I think I underestimated the energy that these robots have at full chat.

I wanted to build something I could take to any event, but it seems if your going to the champs as well you need either a spinner, or a really tough invertible box to survive a spinner.

[maddox10]

Explosion. Ain't a spinner nor a moving bunker.

[plargen]

scruffys still worked after GSL just the scoop got bent and the body had some chew marks,so if you made your bot from 10-15mm t6/t7 aluminium bolted together and got a piece of 5mm hardox to bolt on the front as the blade for your scoop then it should withstand a good bit of punishment

the normal cheap aluminium on ebay wont last long

were you aiming to build something like mr pink

[plargen]

Explosion. Ain't a spinner nor a moving bunker.

true and they have a good hardox chassis that stand up to allot of punishment

[Ellis]

The metal on Tormenta 2 was, oddly, what was pretty useless. The HDPE chassis stood up perfectly well, and the 10mm HDPE sides kept out NST, 720 and Inertia XL pretty comfortably. I wouldn't recommend them for scoop material if you have an alternative, but for relatively cheap and strong structural parts, plastics work nicely.

[daveimi]

Yeah exactly like mr pink but double ended and invertable? Like picture gluing two together? lol so one end is upside down at any one time?

The other side to is was something that looks like mr pink but with a lifting arm that rises out of it.

Ellis I will look at direct plastics now!

[plargen]

with that design you could do 20-30mm hdpe sides cut to shape and bolt metal plate to the hdpe at the 3 angles you wanted then if 1 gets damage you could just replace the the 1 section

[psychostorm]

Useless, the lot of you. None of you came out with it.
Any thickness of material will come off if not secured together securely.

[daveimi]

Lol that made me laugh.

Thats a really good idea, would you use angle iron etc to drill and bolt it all together or just literally drill and screw it all together?

[plargen]

either should work but i f i were using 20mm + then i would use something like these screwed into the hdpe
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Pack-of-4-...item25738175ae

and then bolt through the base plate, lid etc

you might be able to get versions with a larger external thread

[SamO]

There OK, but to me, they look very liable to strip the HDPE. I would probably just go for self tappers, they have worked well for use so far.

But the again, I have no experience with them so what do I know !