[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

And the ratcheting mechanism wouldn't have to be beefy at all. If you put it at the first stage of the tranny, it only sees as much torque as the CIM does. Of course it'd have to ratchet at 2600 RPM, but still. You could put it a stage or two down, and it still wouldn't be that bad.

I realized that, but you'd want it at the end in case a gear broke or something.

One thing I've always wanted to try was to see if a lego motor could lift one of our full size robots. You would have to use non-lego gears though because the lego gears are quite inefficient and under that kind of load probably pretty prone to breaking. I was able to lift about 27 lbs with a lego motor (and all lego construction) It would have done more if the axle had not flexed so much and separated the gear mesh.