Branding a robotics tool cart
When starting a FIRST Robotics team, it is important to ensure that team tools and storage are properly branded. This helps establish your identity in the pit and identification around other teams. With just a 3d printer, some painter's tape, and a few cans of spray paint, it is super easy to cleanly brand your tool cart while replacing the factory cart branding.
The first thing that is needed to brand a tool cart is a 3d printed copy of your team's logo. For Compass Robotics, this was done by importing the SVG file of our logo into Autodesk Fusion, then making a rectangle sketch around the edges and extruding the text to 1/4 inch and the backing plate to 1/16 inch.
After exporting the newly created part as an stl and 3d printing it, the print came out looking pretty clean with few artifacts.
In order to make the print stand out more and have the text be legible from a distance, we decided to use the closest spray paint colors we could find to our team's colors, painting the letters teal, and the accents gold.
The first step in making sure that only the letters got painted teal was to cover up the arrow separating the two words with some painter's tape.
Now that we covered the portion of the logo that needs to be painted gold, we needed to spray paint the logo without getting the paint all over the base of the logo. Simply spraying the logo would not work as the entire piece would end up teal, so we decided to spray a generous amount of the paint onto a piece of cardboard, then dip the logo into it, covering just the letters.
After two coats of spray paint, the text in our logo was looking pretty nice.
We let the paint dry on the 3d print for a full day before proceeding to the next step to ensure that the paint would stay on the letters and not peel off.
After letting the paint fully dry, we taped over the letters with painter's tape, leaving just the arrow in the middle exposed.
We then repeated the same steps of dipping the piece in the spray paint, doing two coats for full coverage.
In order to mount the 3d printed logo onto the tool cart, we used 3M VHB on the back of the logo to adhere it to the cart.
After putting adhesive on the 3d printed logo, we used a putty knife to remove the factory branding from our U.S. General tool cart.
After attaching the logo to the tool cart, we now have a very nice looking finished product that is easy to replicate.