45 steel is generally not recommended for 150g antweight combat robot blades, especially if they are meant to be spinning weapons. While it’s a relatively strong steel, its properties aren’t ideal for the high-impact and potentially brittle nature of a spinning blade in a combat robot.
Here’s why:
Antweight combat robots: are small, typically 150g, and battles are intense.
Spinning weapons: can experience high stress and impact forces.
#45 steel: is a carbon steel with decent strength, but it can be prone to shattering or cracking under repeated impacts, especially if the blade is thin.
(copied and pasted cuz i could’nt be bothered to type it all)
45 steel isnt going to crack or shatter, it will bend. 2mm thick blades bend fairly regularly at ant scales, and I wouldn’t have much faith in 2.5 given the size of your blade. Honestly 3mm might still bend if you get a particularly big weapon to weapon hit
Your best bet is definitely to redesign it to be lighter. Theres not much point worrying over the shape of the blade, the difference it makes is very minor. As long as its balanced and not too thin, you’ll be ok.
If you do want a better material, your best bet is to find someone who’s running a group metal order and get the bar lasercut from hardox/raex. They’re pretty hard but impact resistant steels, and bars would only be a few quid each to get cut as part of a large order.
in regards to material and blade design what jed said pretty much covers it
most people use lasered/charles day for 3mm reax (general wear plate) although for a couple of ant blades you could be looking silly money due to minimum orders but its worth messaging them for some quotes and see what comes back. but yeah ideally look for a group order or order enough yourself to justify it
from memory k cut have a lower minimum order but that might be me misremembering
design wise mainly you just want to avoid sharp internal corners to avoid stress risers, very unlikely to have any effect at ant weight but its good practice in general when it comes to getting stuff made. the bar design you have would likely be fine with a little weight saving. you could go to making it single toothed (not symmetrical) which could give you some better bite with the downside of not being able to reverse it when it dulls
Not to be an arse but I don’t think taking someone’s query and sticking it in Chat-GPT is a particularly helpful way to go about assisting others, especially when, as Morgan points out, it’s not going to be at all reliable.
yeah, sorry for not mentioning and forgetting that ai is sometimes stupider than me (true fact) but i did just search it up and scrolled through some advice and/ or websites, but to be fair it should be ok.
Please refrain from copy pasting stuff like this in the future as it defeats the purpose of a forum - which is people sharing their personal experience in the hobby with each other thanks
I’m not sure I really have the facilities or patience to wait for a group order, so I think I may end up sticking with the 45 steel.
I do however, have access to some metal heat treating tools, so I could try tip hardening, or hardening the whole thing? to be honest though, I really have no Idea if that’s the right thing or not to do for 45 steel. Would that potentially make the blade stronger/more effective somehow?
I’ll send updates when I redesign the blade. I’m thinking just making it shorter, and then completely symmetrical for extra weight saving, instead of the asymmetrical ordeal that I currently have.
If you’re pretty comfortable with hardening and can uniformly heat and get a reliables temp then sure. It c45 seems to be a simple heat ‘n quench. Surface hardness will still fly below hardox levels iirc just be aware you might face some distortion - may or may not be enough to matter. I’m not a materials expert despite all the badges and hats I keep making for myself.
Personally I wouldn’t bother because it’s only ants anyway. For the majority of it’s life it’s hitting plastic. I’d just get 3-4 cut and replace as they bend or blunt past effectiveness.
I always prefer to bend over snap because one you can patch in the field and one you have to bin.
Like Harry I have a lot of hats, and one of them is knife making. You can try harden it, but like Harry says probably not worth it. The line between bending and shattering (violently) is both highly situational and also quite fine and you’d be wasting some blades just attempting to figure it out. You could harden it, then anneal the entire blade except for the teeth (as you would a custom lathe tool from an HSS blank), but I don’t think that gains you much - the teeth will just snap off.
Also worth noting that exploding weapons are really bad from a safety perspective. Ever seen what happens when someone puts a carbide insert on a horizontal spinner?
thanks