[cj3958]

I will preface this by saying that I was not there durring this time, however my dad was, and I went to some competitions once i was old enough to understand what was going on. From what my dad has told me, the biggest thing that was different was the number of motors and gearboxes available. It was extremely difficult to get torque out of motors back then, because none of the motors has a standard shaft that was keyed or something similar to what we have today, because all of the motors were designed to be put in a drill or something like that. I got the impression that it would be like if every motor had an output shaft similar to the window motor, and each team had to figure out how to get that shaft to move their drivetrain separately, because there was no andymark that would make a gearbox with that output shaft as an input. On that note, every gearbox was also a struggle, because you had to effectively weld gears to shafts to get the torque to transfer because there was no standard hex shaft or hex shaft berrings or hex shaft bores to use on gears. Towards the end(just before andymark came out) people would use dewalt motor transmissions in order to get shifting and have a good gearbox they could use for everything.