@DRow confirmed on VTOTW that they’re pretty light.
Were I to guess, they probably weight about as much as Cones from ITZ
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Yeah, the cones were .23 lb. If I remember correctly.
I would assume the cubes are probably made of polypropylene as ITZ cones were definitely made of it and so were caps I think. Perhaps the mass of the cubes could be estimated using CAD software if we use the density of polypropylene?
According to volume calculations in Autodesk Inventor, one half of a cube is 124 cm^3 in volume. There are also 4 screws and nuts to hold the entire cube together (although those are pretty negligible).
Depending on what type of plastic you think it is made of, it probably has a density from around .9-1.05 g/cm^3. That will give you a total of about 250 g per cube, about .55 lbs or 8.8 oz. That puts the cubes about twice the weight of an ITZ cone (118 g) and 3/4 the weight of a TP cap (335 g).
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Is that accounting for the hollowness of the cube?
Yes (twenty characters)
Then I think it’s safe to assume that it will be the same type of plastic as the ITZ cones. Is that the kind of plastic you used on Autodesk?
There are a lot of different materials that they could be made out of. VEX has not used just one material for plastic game objects. The caps this year were ABS. The Hubs for VIQC this year and the ITZ cones were Polypropylene (those were objects I had on hand and had visible material numbers on them). It is possible that the cubes will be made out of either of those and even possibly something else. And there are also lots of flavors of those plastics, so it is difficult to know the exact density even if we knew which plastic (here is a chart that shows you densities of some plastic types: https://omnexus.specialchem.com/polymer-properties/properties/density).
In the end all the likely suspects float around 1 gm/cm^3, so it will probably only vary 5-10% from my estimate depending on what the actual material is.
Thank you for you’re help, it’s very appreciated. Gotta get to work on an arm that can lift .55 pounds reliably and quickly.
@Kylarblaze You bet, good luck on your design. Don’t restrict yourself to 1 cube - no possession or expansion limits mean tall stacks built with multiple cubes at once. And tall stacks of cubes tipping over!
This is going to be fun!
I overheard someone ask a field tech at the demo field at IQ Worlds earlier today. The field tech said that the cubes weigh about 330 grams.
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Thank you fine sir!!!
I held one in my hand. It is lighter than you think. It’s about as light as it can get. I’d say it’s ROUGHLY a little bit heavier than a cone.
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Most likely .3 to .5 pounds then. That’s what the general consensus says, from what I’ve gathered.
Official Cube weight is 285 grams. (~.63 lbs)
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Thanks Dillon, you’re the best!
Brilliant, thank you. Will this be added to Appendix A sometime in the the future?
Yes, Appendix A has already been slightly updated to include this weight.
https://link.vex.com/docs/vrc-tower-takeover/AppendixA
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I took one and measured it. The cubes weight is 0.628 pounds.
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