Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Matteson
Another thing a lot of teams do is buy gears from AndyMark and package them in a custom housing to meet their packaging needs. Doing this you can buy gears, pre hex broached even and get the ratios that you want by combining various gears. This is what we have done several years and occasionally we swap in a custom gear that we have to hex broach ourselves.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341
Many/most custom transmissions in FIRST seem to be repackagings of AndyMark ToughBox/Shifter guts into something that fits with a team's chassis. Banging out new sideplates is trivial if you have access to a laser cutter/water jet/CNC mill.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by artdutra04
Many of the teams who have "custom" gearboxes simply simply take COTS AndyMark gears and rearrange and/or repackage them into custom housings. Usually this is done to reduce weight, facilitate mounting and integration into chassis/mechanism, or to obtain custom gear ratios by swapping out gears. 228 has used this style of custom gearboxes for several years now, mostly in drivetrain applications. This is pretty easy to do, so long as you have accurate machining capability (CNC mill, laser, punch, etc).
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There is one more thing to add to these comments. Some teams not only use AM parts to make their own custom gearboxes, but they also spend much time to optimize AM parts before assembling the parts into their gearboxes. People have told me that before they put the AM parts into these gearboxes, they have their students go over each gear with a jeweler's file, clearing away any miniscule burr that may be on the edge of the gear. This attention to detail makes the gearbox slightly more efficient than it was before this final precision work is done. We could do this at AM, but it would increase our cost and price significantly.
Andy B.