[kwotremb]

Originally Posted by Randy Forgaard

I'm interested in your last sentence there. You mentioned you were going to install a bumper where the arm hits the frame, but you didn't need to do that because you designed the arm so the cylinder "maed out" before it hit a hard stop. I'm not sure what the means, but it sounds promising. Could you explain a little more?

And thanks very much for your detailed recommendations. It sounds like your robot uses a very similar arm mechanism to ours.

Sorry, typo there.

Basically when our mast was all the way at the up we "maxed" (missed the x before) out on the stroke of the cylinder rather than hit a hard stop on the frame. We still had a little bit of hard 'slam' per say, but we were only at 35-40 psi and we felt that out mast was strong enough to take that hit, we were more worried about doing wheelies or ruining the cylinder. But with the battery and compressor in the front of the robot, it took a lot to do a wheelie. Also the cylinders should be designed to take more of an impact then we were putting it under. We were more worried about beding something if we kept hitting the mast onto the frame so we were just going to add some rubber or foam piece to add a shock absorber in that location.

What I would do with testing is start fully closed and slowly open it up as you test (that what we did for the free fall). Now I dont know if there will be enough air in the cylinder to compress to a psi high enough to counter the 60 psi you are lifting the arm up, but in theory I believe it should help.

Here is a decent pic of our robot in starting config, shows mostly what we were doing:
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...1/IMG_4565.jpg