I am about to build a plywood box to transport our robot to Worlds. I know to be considered checked baggage it can’t be more than 63" total for HxLxW. What have you found works best? Do you use 2x2 on inside corners? How did you put on the top and what works best? Piano hinge? Handles? Anyone have pictures of their box to share?
Team 2118A
Gloucester, VA
Take your robot to a UPS store. Tell them you want to package it for luggage. They’ll get you a 24x24 cardboard box, and give you enough packing peanuts to fill it. No problems when we flew our robots to Florida last year for the VEX All-Stars Challenge.
we have made a few transport boxes for Vex Robots, we usually make them from 6 19" square aluminium sheets and use aluminium angle to bolt them together, we normally bolt the lid on with one hinge that is 19"s long, I will post some pictures later of the boxes
here is a photo of our flight box before we modified it to make it beter
you can see the hinge running along the back
If I remember correctly, last year we ordered 5 of these cases in the 20" x 20" x 20" size for our teams:
They are meant to last for several uses, rather than a one-time shipment to Anaheim.
Where did you get Al sheets and how thick was it?
We used 24x24x24 boxes with 18x18x18 boxes inside for the robot. Filled the remainder with peanuts, bubble wrap, and misc stuff. Some dented edges but nothing close to the robots.
We used the ground shipping from the event on a palette rather than taking it on the plane. You can’t toss a palette too easily but a single box is a lot easier. However you must give up your robot a week and a half early.
Have you considered shipping with some other local teams as one consolidated group?
WE use a 20x20x20 pelican case (so do many others)
They hold up for a long time and are much more robust to the TSA than most homemade boxes.
The only time we shipped robots we used 20x20x20, double thickness cardboard boxes. We then used a 19.5x19.5 sheet of 1/2 inch plywood to which we attached the robot supported on wooden blocks so it was not on its wheels, this was then placed in the cardboard box and surrounded by as much 1/2 inch thick foamcore as we could get around the edges along with bubble wrap etc. This was much less expensive than the road case solution and could be shipped as luggage. Of course the airline lost both robots but that’s another story…
You guys need to stop with the horror stories. We’re paranoid something like this would happen. This is why we are driving for 10 hours rather than flying. We don’t want to try rebuilding the entire thing the night before Worlds with spare parts.
Lucky you, our first 10 hours is not even going to get us out of Texas. Were going to try and drive about 14 hours to avoid spending the night in a border town. Then we will only have about 10 hours left… 
For $792.69 (Pelican AL2624) I think I could buy the robot a first class round trip ticket and not worry about damage.
Search for my very first post on the forums and you can read all about my experience in Orlando.
If anyone else was interested:
That’s awesome. I know how much fun it is to actually compete with a robot you built literally AT the competition. Glad you guys did well with them.
Reading that, it seems like there is some sort of booth set up at Words. Does that mean that VEX actually has the full store on-site where we could theoretically buy more parts without shipping time? As in the IMEs that have been out of stock for a month might be there, and we could buy/use them?
The ground/drop shipping offered by Vex worked wonderfully for us last year. You lose a few days but I trust a pallette in a truck much more than Airline, FedEx, or UPS normal methods. There are very steep ramps in those sort facilities that are not always kind to robots in a box.
10 hours of driving by one team member is very doable in a day. The rest can fly if you like (and spend 3 hours at the airport waiting and then getting a rental car so you may not be that far off from them by driving). We did this when Vex was in Orlando with 2 day drive for that person , and the rest flew in mostly.
International teams may not have this option though,
Ahh yes, we also put up on blocks to alleviate wheel weight and shock absorbtion. More than just bubble wrap.
Here’s our pallete from last year. Arrived in one piece with no problems on the robots at all.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66331260@N08/7060252591/
20in^3 sheet metal box lined with pink foam… For 2 years our robots have survived rough airline luggage handling, being hauled down several flights of stairs by one unfortunate guy at LAX after it broke the luggage conveyor, and even being thrown around by an angry Disney bus driver.