[EricH]

Originally Posted by Twest3259

Have any teams in the past used wooden gears? and What where the advantages disadvantages? How did you fabricate these gears? Would wooden gears be reasonable for a 2x2x5 robot designed to sumo?

I can't think of anybody using wooden gears in FRC.

And I can think of some reasons why.

• Wood won't necessarily slide against wood as well as metal does. Wood also doesn't take grease as well to make it slide better.
• Wood splinters. Ouch.
• Metal tends to have more strength for this sort of application.
• You just about have to make your own. Wood may be a bit easier to cut than metal...but you still have to do the cutting.

This is not to say that you couldn't use wooden gears, particularly for something that smallish. A wide face width and some very good sanding would help, as would using a spoke-and-cage type of setup, where one gear is a circle with a bunch of dowels sticking out of the flat side and the other has a bunch of dowels sticking out of the curved side.

As a more practical alternative, I would suggest plastic gears, which you could probably find at your local hobby shop (though those would be servo replacement gears most likely).