Reusing gearbox & bearings
 

Does anyone know if we are allowed to use the same gearbox and bearings that we used last year?

Re: Reusing gearbox & bearings
 

Using the Part Use Flowchart from page 10 of Section 5- The Robot from the manual, I would say you can use the bearings as long as you account for their original cost(since they are off the shelf) but not the gearboxes(since they were fabricated before the 2004 Kickoff). If you still wanted to use the gearboxes, you could always use the same design but just re-machine the parts that were machined by the team before.

Re: Reusing gearbox & bearings
 

if it was a custom gearbox your team designed and fabricated - then you can build a new copy of it, but you cant use the same physical mechansim

if you are talking about the gearbox that FIRST gave us in the kit of parts, then yes, its the same this year - so you could resuse the same one - but I wouldnt recommend it

the gearbox supplied by FIRST has a plastic housing, and you dont know what kind of a beating it took last year - it might be stressed or have fractures in the plastic that could give out in the middle of the match.

The one in our practice frame from last year has cracks in it (where the bearings are held in) - we beat it up pretty good while debugging the auton code - slamming from full forward to full reverse in one CPU cycle will do that! :^)

Definately use all the new parts from the kit whenevery you can.