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Unread 03-02-2005, 16:18
Evan Austin Evan Austin is offline
out of my mind, be back later
no team
Team Role: Alumni
 
Join Date: May 2004
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: Vincennes, Indiana
Posts: 30
Evan Austin is an unknown quantity at this point
Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Quote:
Originally Posted by suneel112
Then somebody suggested using a popped 2x ball to do the trick. We got a popped 2x ball (I don't remember whether it was form our kit or from our good friends on 447) , cut it into strips, and stretched it around the arms.
If it was at Atlanta it could have been from us. I remember the ball, but I don't know what happened to the rest of it. We wrapped part of the ball around the grabbers on our robot to try and make them hold the ball better. It helped, but it didn't cure it completely.

We also had a problem with a shaft in our drivetrain gear reduction start binding on us in Atlanta. We had two gears on the shaft that were welded together with a spacer in between them, and we had them cotterpinned to the shaft so that the assembly would ride in bearings. After trying for a couple of hours to readjust the shaft to eliminate the bind, with no success, I had the idea to just remove the cotterpin and let the gears spin on the shaft. This worked very well, despite the fact that we now had steel spinning on steel, but it only had to last for 2 more days so why not go for it? We also got an added bonus by taking out the cotterpins in that our sprockets were now self aligning!

As for weight reduction, at Great Lakes last year our robot was about 3 pounds overweight. As a last chance attempt, myself and another team member got out our pocketknives and proceeded to trim the treads off the sides of our tires. It didn't get us 3 pounds, but when you have less than 1 hour left to be inspected for the regional, you'll do just about anything.
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