[Bryce2471]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Any chance you could post a quick screenshot / view of one of these? I'd love to take a look. Might end up doing something similar if it isn't too difficult to make. Certainly easier than doing design gymnastics to make the COTS part work the way I want it to.

Yes. I'll probably just post another render with only the shifting components visible.

There's certainly nothing wrong with the Vex shaft design; it does what Vex is trying to accomplish and it works for their COTS product, but it definitely isn't tailored for WCD.

Their shifter shaft definitely does the job they want it to, but I still think it could have been designed in a way that woud have made their gearbox more versatile and the shifting components more useful. The way they have it set up makes two stage drive systems impractical. Wheather it's in custom gearboxes or their COTS box.

I sketched this out last night and the biggest difficulty with it is clearance between the motors and the middle gears. You end up with a really big gearbox if you go 3 CIM unless you use idler gears (not necessarily out of the question).

I agree with this, but another option you should consider is using belts in the first stage to relocate the CIMs. This would turn out similar to 192's gearbox, but you could possibly get the pneumatic cylinder out of the belly pan as well.