Exactly my point. Why harden parts if the steel is commercialy available without heat treatment?

It was definitely better for me to cut out the extra cost and time for heat treating and extra transport. As far as I know, its the same or a little cost to cut the wear steel compared to unhardened steel.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

It really depends on which kind of equipment is available and which kind of shape you want the parts to be.
I my case all the wear plate sellers in China happen to have only laser cutters/water jet for whatever reason, but my parts have features that a laser cutter cannot do. In that case I had to have someone do machining on the parts, which makes a softer steel more viable.

There is always a compromise somewhere - you just have to decide which one to take. Commercial machine shops can machine hardened steel, they just don't like to to unusual jobs with a different set-up. That's where us hobbyists have an advantage. My hardened beaters had axles turned on the ends and Glen did some very neat CNC milling on Bisalloy for Dylon's vertical spinner - so its possible for smaller machines to do good work on hardened steel.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

Yeah there's always a compromise somewhere. I couldn't agree more.

Update:
It turns out that there's currently a campaign going on in China to reduce pollution, and that campaign shut down the heat treating plants.
Now I guess I will have to do the heat treat in Sydney...

One regret I have: If I knew they had a wire cutting machine (which they told me just today) I would just go with hardox 450 straight away... What a shame...

Next time when I'm updating the design I will probably come up with a better spinner design and hopefully put that hardox into good use.

I'm thinking about this but I'm really not sure if I will do this or not...

I recently heard that King of Bots actually sponsors builders to build heavyweights. (of course the bots then belongs to the host of the program)

I can't go for this year's event cuz it's already too late, but I might be able to go for next year's event. (If KoB is still there by then, most Chinese programs tend to have short lifespans.) I might also want to team up with someone...

But that's all in the far future... I should probably start sorting out the mess I made with my featherweight design first.

For featherweight disks I prefer 12 or 15mm thick Hardox 550.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvouY1CxUfE


The monster beater we arranged for Nick over here was 30mm thick.

Wire cutting (EDM) is usually a very specialised and expensive process - far more expensive than laser I am told.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

Yes it's more expensive than laser cutting. The problem I had was that the holes in the spinner discs have a diameter smaller than the thickness of the plate, which laser cannot cut.

That's why I almost always use waterjetting. I don't know what the maximum hole diameter to depth ratio is, but I haven't hit it yet. Apart from the heat treating, are the parts getting totally finished in China?

Now that the parts are arriving without hardening, it is a really good idea to completely assemble the frame and check for problems before sending parts out for treatment - its way easier to adjust things while they are soft.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

quote:

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Originally posted by MoonSet416:
Yes it's more expensive than laser cutting. The problem I had was that the holes in the spinner discs have a diameter smaller than the thickness of the plate, which laser cannot cut.

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Interesting - do you know if they have an unusual laser system? None of our local shops appear to be able to do that - at least not the ones we have gotten quotes from.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

The problem I had with aquacut was that they couldn't do countersunks on the armor plates and the leading edge of the wedge/front armor. Otherwise water jetting would have been great.

Cutting 8mm holes in 15mm sheet sounds very interesting though...

Another idea I had was to just do a pilot hole with a laser and then use a drill press. But then we are talking about drilling in hardox...

Update:
The current state of things is, if I get lucky I might just manage to bring the parts with me, if not I will have to mail them to Sydney.

Either way time will be working against me as I prepare for the event in August. Soldering should begin shortly. However, heat treating the steel parts will have a very tight time limit, so I'm considering just doing it with a local heat treating plant... Any suggestions?

I figured that the discs won't stick with the bot so long as I would probably want to change them to hardox as soon as possible. I would also like to change the design of the discs but that's for another day...