How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

Our team was planning on possibly making a slingshot style launcher, where a motorized winch pulls back and arms our cannons and then we would shift into a neutral gear to disengage the winch and, and the ball would be fired, similar to 1114 in 2008 (Im sure you've seen a lot of them in the past 5 days).
I was wondering how difficult it would be to convert the 3 Cim BallShifters our team ordered so it would have a neutral gear, or if there is a better way to accomplish the same task, that wouldn't require taking apart our gearboxes?

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

Make sure you figure out a hard stop to prevent backdriving, once loaded.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

Probably want to look at the page again-- they ship with assembly required, so any modifications can be made while putting them together.

You could definitely do it outside of the shifter-- basically add an outside stage with a dog-style release (a la Simbot SS). Inside might take a little more creativity though.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

We are working on a similar setup with the 2-CIM shifter. My concern currently is the level of force applied from the 60 psi pancake as compared to a long-throw lever arm. We may spring load it, since significant rotational load will be on the gear we want to disengage. We'll find out tomorrow...

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

It should be as simple as removing one of the output gears on the shifting stage and repacking it with a spacer. This way it has no gear to engage when shifted in one position (neutral).

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

If you don't want to replace a gear you can get a pancake cylinder with a stroke that will shift into neutral position (in between the high and low gear). An even easier way would be adding a spacer to the pancake cylinder shaft to limit travel.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

There are 6 balls within the ball shifter, three for each of the two shifting gears that engage. If you remove the three balls for one of the gears, that gear will never engage, effectively leaving you with a neutral position.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

The easiest way to do it is to not install the drive gear for the low gear stage and put a spacer or even a much smaller diameter gear of the same width in its place.

You can do it by removing gears and/or balls from the driven shifter cluster but the spacer trick is quick and simple if you want to keep the high gear.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

Did you order 3 cim ball shifters just for this task? Seems kinda overkill to me.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

My team did this at Thursday meeting for our prototypes. However, the transmission had some difficulty properly engaging and disengaging.
We were running it without load and shifting by hand.

We're going to take it apart tomorrow and see if we notice anything buggy in the system.
If that still doesn't work, plan B is to create a neutral for our super shifters.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

Along the same lines- just remove the balls from the high gear so that the plunger has nothing to clutch into for that gear set.

-Brando

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

You could machine teeth off the gears so that they never mesh. ;)

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

Thanks for the help, Ill be sure to try your suggestions whenever the thing gets here... We ordered it before kickoff and it still isn't here!:eek:

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

No, I agree that would be a bit excessive haha, we ordered them for our drivetrain.

Re: How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?
 

You can simply remove the input gear for the high speed gear stage. That is the easiest way.

We are testing this now to see the max loading the ball shifter can still shift into neutral. My theoretical calculation indicates in excess of 400 lbs in a 2" diameter winch.