Near Chaos Robotics

[harry hills]

Dude that's brutal!

[Eventorizon]

Ah, now I now how I can complete a design of mine! Watch out plastic robots!

[PJ-27]

Chainsaws FTW!

[PJ-27]

How do you get such clean straight cuts on your metal?

[MikeNCR]

It's all waterjet cut.

[Ellis]

This is looking great! Nice to see some classic style weapons. Thing looks nasty, might actually be quite effective.

It would seem you have lots of experience with watercutting... generally, how is the quality of cut across thickish material (15mm alu, for example)? I'm a bit worried about the inaccuracy and taper of the cut edges. Do you think that's a reasonable worry?

[MikeNCR]

It certainly can be an issue. Higher end waterjets (like the one Team Whyachi has) have taper compensation as part of the design. The ones that don't will have a pretty obvious taper even on thinner material. For this bot, once everything was cut we went over the mating surfaces and flattened them with a belt sander to get things squared up.

http://bigbluesaw.com/ is another waterjet resource, they've got two options, regular and low taper, which are exactly what they sound like. http://bigbluesaw.com/index.php?opti...&thickness=0.5 shows a rough price comparison with a sample part. Best thing to do generally is to get all of your same thickness parts cut at once so you only have to deal with one loading fee. http://bigbluesaw.com/saw/faqs/parts...t-cutting.html has a good comparison of low vs. regular taper.

[Ellis]

That last link shows a significant taper for regular services. Surprisingly marked. Likely to be problematic in my case.

Well, that changes things, and likely not for the cheaper! Thanks for the response and links. May have just made a decision for me.

[Max]

Looks really cool, what size are those wheels, and do you have any pictures of the internals, looks very compact!

[MikeNCR]

It's got 8" wheels (http://www.robotmarketplace.com/products/NPC-PT318.html)

I'll take a few internal pictures tonight and post them. Not a ton to see as it's just three esc's, (weapon one is permanently installed) a power switch, rx, battery, and battery padding.