[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I can't speak for other teams, but we don't drill out the plactions and sprockets because we reuse them each year. We don't have a tremendously huge budget, so we'd rather spend the $25 a year replacing the fasteners rather than the $150-$200 buying new plaction wheels and sprockets to meet the letter of the FIRST rule.

Tom-

Can you just clarify what setup you had on your plactions. Was it a full combination of AM plactions, AM (plastic) spacers, and AM sprockets?

Was there generally a period of time before you would shear the bolts? For example, would you replace the bolts, get ~20 matches out of them, and then end up having to replace those bolts again?


I'm just hypothesizing about the nature of plastic parts in these situations. I'm wondering if the plastic parts creep slightly and therefore gradually lose the pre-load of the bolt. The parts may still appear tightly attached together, but losing some of that pre-load would then amplify any shear stress on the bolt and eventually cause a failure.

Just a thought I had.

-Brando