Clusterbot

Wooden blades on a medium speed setting and the jigsaw goes through polycarb like butter.

can anyone give me advice about making a shell from kevlar or carbon fibre, i know nothing about it except i think you use it in the same way as standard fiberglass. for my clusterbot, i have made a shell out of ply to get the shape i want. (which i couldnt do with metal lol) i would like to strengthen the bottom of the shell all around the robot with thick ali or something. Im not sure if this is going to give good armour amongst todays machines but i know mortis used something similar.

The main differences are when you are trying to cut the stuff. You need sharp scissors to cut kevlar and sanding both materials is a bit of a nightmare. Kevlar fluffs up and carbon produces nasty fibres.
In terms of layup you can treat them almost identically to glassfibre but you should try even harder to get a good layup to make the most of the extra material costs. Using peel ply is relatively cheap and easy and would help with getting good consolidation, save resin and gives a nice surface finish. Vacuum bagging would help even more if you can be bothered.
One tip Ive learnt with using Kevlar, if youre not after ultimate strength or stiffness and just want the part to hold together after sustaining some damage, layup the kevlar in the middle of the ply stack but make sure it stays relatively dry. That way the fibres wont break after an impact and will loosely hold it all together.

This tutorial seems pretty good for general composites work:
http://rv8a.tripod.com/fiberglass.htmlhttp://rv8a.tripod.com/fiberglass.html
& for the higher tech stuff:
http://www.netcomposites.com/education.asp?sequence=81http://www.netcomposites.com/education.asp?sequence=81
good luck!

not sure either material is good to use for armour. its expencive, time consuming and needs to be repaired properly after inevitable damage to look good. if its the carbon look your after why not make it out of steel or ali and then get the sticky back genuine carbon fibre cloth to put over it.

cheers mark, will have a look at that, see if it is something i could have a go at, i would like to definatley give it a try as its different.
thanks james, perhaps you can make it for me out of ali if needed, as i cant weld ali and steel is too heavy,i have a wooden mock up to work from, but i just dont know if the shape can be made easily from ali. its coming together nicely now and i really want to get it finished. will post some pics shortly.

just got a question, would a 12v nimh 3700mah be sufficent to run 2 x 9.6v drills with a sabertooth, for the duration of a fight?

I believe it would easily last two or three fights - Drumroll was in a total of six (or seven) fights at the Eurochamps running 2 x 9.6V drills at 12V with 4500mAh capacity SLA batteries and didnt need charged once, didnt even appear to lose any speed, although it was not doing excessive amounts of pushing.

But yeah you should be fine with them Adrian. Any pics of the happy clusterbot couple yet? :)

we use 3000mA 7.2v batteries in our kits they can run for atleast an hour without a charge, they will probably last you a whole event in some cases.

great cheers, and also are their any machines around that can pierce 12mm hdpe? im guessing Drawgons claw, but wasnt sure about little hitter. will post some pics later this week, by about thursday when its all painted up.

(Message edited by ady on January 28, 2008)

Little hitter never got through our HPDE armour, not the 5 mm let alone the 10 mm. It does leave its mark though. Crushers like Dragons claw go through it like a hot knife through butter.