Chassis Study No. 4

Most displays show a robot the way it looked on the last day of the season: painted, stickered, and photographed. This plate is the opposite of that. It is one of the first parts a team cuts, before anyone knows whether the season's design will actually work.

We keep it unfinished because the plate is a drawing you can touch. Every hole is a decision somebody argued about, and the pattern of them explains the whole machine that was eventually bolted to it.

Two slots along the rear edge were filed by hand after the plate was cut, which usually means a gearbox moved late in the build. The four corner holes are countersunk deeply enough to hide a socket-head screw, a common fix when a bumper mount needs to sit flush.

The scratches are concentrated where a battery box used to sit, and the plate is slightly bowed there — a reminder that a competition robot flexes under load in ways a CAD model never predicts.

The plate is displayed unpainted at ambient humidity with a powder-coated steel backer. It is not cleaned: the marks are the record. Any future treatment will be documented on this page rather than done quietly.