pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

Re: pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

Why the bevel gears? Are they just to make the motor package nicely?

Overall, it looks great!

Re: pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

The bevel gears are simply for the ease of mounting the CIM and to prevent any hazardous interference with the kicker itself. Plus, without them, the motor would be hanging off of the gearbox. Earlier today when we were testing it with different sizes of wire, some of the more thin ones actually snapped. We designed it to not be vulnerable to such perilous situations.

Re: pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

Makes sense. Great design, and great job on the CAD!

Re: pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

Thank you! We were really excited to be able to design the gearbox. I had never had such an opportunity before.

Re: pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

It's great to see your designs come to life, isn't it? The first time's particularly exciting. I remember my first time, in the 2008 offseason. I designed a fancy two-axis bearing block in Solidworks, made a drawing, then watched our machinist mill it out of a block of aluminum. That convinced me that I wanted to continue with design, CAD in particular.

Re: pic: Cyber Blue 234's Kicker Recoil Gearbox
 

Well, I've designed other things before, but what made this so special is that we designed the gearbox from scratch. We used calculations to determine what we would need and determined the best way to put all those things together. The application of things I had learned in school is what was particularly fascinating. It's just really awesome to see a real-world application for all the number crunching that is done in math and science classrooms.