Day 36: Drive Train, Belly Pan, Hook Test

The practice bot drive train has begun assembly over the past few days. There were a few minor tweaks to it as it went together to get everything spinning nicely but it is nice and smooth now and the competition robot drive train should go together quickly once it is done being powder coated.

The belly pan will go on tomorrow and we can wire up most of the robot. 

Belly Pan

We have used 1/4" (6mm) Baltic Birch belly pans on all our robots since 2015. They are very rigid and light weight and allow us to easily machine in mounting holes and add other holes when needed. We can lighten them if we need to later with just a hole saw and painting them is easy. This year's was a little tricky as they are 23.25" wide and our router is only 24" so it just barely fit.

Hook Test

We tested a new version of the hook that held 300 lbs without breaking.

- Spectrum

"Practice is not the answer here. Practice, the 10,000 hours thing, practice alone doesn't produce work that matters. No, that only comes from caring. From caring enough to leap, to bleed for the art, to go out on the ledge, where it's dangerous. When we care enough, we raise the bar, not just for ourselves, but for our customer, our audience and our partners." - Seth Godin