Has anyone thought of painting the metal pieces??
I did and love the look.
Sounds like a great idea at first glance but, really if you paint it, it wont look good with everything.
Paint and re-paint
Also with enough coats it could start to add some sustantial weight and size to the peices…
Though it would take a while…
What did you use to paint the metal?
Coloring the metal pieces with a marker gives them a nice dyed luck.
instead of paint, colored tape around the edges may be a good accent to any robot.
I used rustoleum spray paint.
I sanded the parts first using 400 grit sandpaper(shood of used 250 cuz the paint flakes off in spots) then use rustoleum primmer first then the rust red.
The only downside is it makes me more carfale when building, don’t wanna scrach the paint.
If you wanted to repaont it you could just sand the old layer of paint off first then paint it again.
Something I’ve always wanted to try was to take CAD drawings of a few of the metal Vex parts, shrink the critical dimensions down by a a few thousandths of an inch (to accommodate for the powdercoat thickness), and send them to to one of my friend’s parents (who own a CNC Sheet Metal company with several CNC turret-punch machines), and have then punch out custom Vex parts for me out of any 0.040" material I feel like paying for. Aluminum, steel, stainless steel, the possibilities are endless…
And then since they have in-house powder coating, they could then just powder coat all the parts glossy black. I wouldn’t be able to bend any of these parts after they were powder coated, but a glossy black Vex chassis would just look wicked sweet. 
That sounds sooo awesome, I’m jealous.
painting the bot would be so awesome if it were FVC legal
i’m hoping it is…sorta
Well, it looks like the new vex parts may be colored(red and black according to the pictures).
Painting might be FVC legal as long as there is nor rule specifically saying you can’t paint the robot. The paint could be considered as decoration which in most forms is legal.
can any Mod tell us if this painting of robots is FVC legal?
No we can’t.
I suggest you consult your FVC Manual for robot rules.
If you cannot find the answer you’re looking for by reading the rules, you can ask for a rules clarification on the official FVC Q&A forum.
well, too bad 
but it would be really cool to see another person do a little repainting of the vex kit. kind of like the new kit, only maybe just little accents around the edges like already said. for my FRC team, we have used electrical tape to cover sharp edges as well as look nice:
with some help of my teammates, i present our operator interface for this year!
Wow that interface looks pretty cool. At the Va hagin’ around competition we saw a little robot that they had colored red with a permanent marker no one said anything and it looked prety good but I think powdercoating is the wat to go
thats a big problem considering time and money just to paint a bot though
it does sound liek a lot of time for something completely for looks
ok, after looking over the rules, it is technically allowed
this is becuase the paint is a non-functional soley decorational part of the robot
[at least, from what i’ve read/gone over]
its true it is for decoration only so fron my comprehension it is allowed, like I said at the Va competition there was a robot that was painted with markers and they made it to the finals without anyone saying anything so i’m convinced that it is legal