[Swampdude]

We were told Thursday our method of hanging was deemed legal by the GDC from the head ref. They were excited about seeing it work as were we. When we added the strain gauges, we kept pulling on the channel shape I think we over worked the upper weld joint. Then we hung it from a piece of box tube in our pit that deflected and stressed the end joints of the upper plate and cracked the weld a bit (about 3" in on each end). So then we went to the practice field and hung on a real competition bridge and it worked at first but then the plastic on the bridge just drooped an inch! The upper plate ends of our hanging channel were deflecting about 1/4" but the plastic on the bridge between the supporting angle piece to our plate was approx a 30 deg angle! Never expected that... So after seeing that we added spacers to get up higher which worked but only made the plastic deflect even more. So it's like doing a pull-up on a rubber bar.

We did try it in one match but it never got off the ground and we weren't on all the way (which is key to it working) the team ended up driving off the end of the ramp. Can't remember the team number, but thank you for trying it with us.

So we didn't want to use it again Friday unless we had a fix. Saturday we put brackets on the end that wouldn't deflect and shorten the distance between the bridge angle and the bot. Worked great on the practice field, but we only had the last match of quals to try it. 1902 agreed to coop with us so we were excited to finally pull it off but they lost coms in the match and didn't show up. We were in position and another team with mechanums actually did climb our ramp and got into position with about 7 seconds left. So we went to lift and the ramp motor pinion snapped in half while the other bot was climbing our ramp so we couldn't lift the ramp to hang. Totally bummed out.

We didn't have a spare motor and pinion ready for that arm and tried to put something together for elims but I think we messed up the PG71 gearbox so the ramp/shooter/hanger never worked in elims.

1251 and 25 picked us and did a great job against the winning alliance. Since we couldn't do anything else, we tried to play defense on 86 coming to our scoring side but weren't effective without the ramp/shooter/hanger. We were going to try a 3 bot balance on top of the bridge but got flipped by 86.

Anyway, we'll have it hanging in Boca, I'm sure of it...