[Jared]

Our team would really love to see a simple aluminum hex sleeve that's .750 - .500" long or so. We use steel hex sleeves from sdp-si, but these are expensive and heavy. This year, we turned down various aluminum parts with hex shafts in them, including gears, sprockets, pulleys, and the old colson hubs to make our own sleeves, but this seems a little wasteful. The sleeves can be used to couple shafts within gearboxes, or can be used to drive things without hex bores, like McMaster sure grip wheels, with the help of some loctite cylindrical bonding compound.

The versa planetary gearboxes are really awesome, and the aluminum shafts, sprockets, and pulleys are all really strong. The straightness of the hex shaft varies slightly from shaft to shaft, but is generally quite good.

Some of our half inch round (not hex!) bearings were between .498 and .499. We made shafts that press fit into other half inch bearings, including last years half inch bearings, but didn't fit the new bearings. Not a huge deal, but it was unexpected.

Overall, we were really happy with the vex belts, chains, sprockets, and pulleys we used this year.