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Originally Posted by sanddrag
A good way to couple it to the shaft is to drill and tap a hole in the shaft for a socket head cap screw, something like #10 would be good if your shaft it big enough. Then, heat shrink the head of the screw to the shaft of the encoder leaving a little space in between. The ridges on the head of the screw and the surface area of the relatively long shaft encoder shaft will prevent slippage. Now you have a very cheap flexible coupling. I would recommend mounting the encoder with a rather thin piece of sheet metal so that has some flex too. Rigidly mounting/coupling encoders can cause them to wear and/or break.
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We did this in 2004, and had some problems with it. The biggest being since your putting the wheels out at angles on the edges it leaves little room to mount the encoder, if you cant get the encoder inline with the shaft then it doesnt work very well, also the tubing we used to make the couplers would load sometimes when we changed directions. Also, since they were mounted outside the wheel they were very prone to breaking in a hit, even with lexan convering.
This year we devised a much better plan that gave us no issues except when the encoders were shimmed wrong and hit the rollers on the wheel and snapped the encoder shaft. We bought small timing belt and pullies from sdp-si and mounted the encoder to the side of the gearbox. You can see it in
this picture, near the middle.
I dont remeber any of the info on the encoders, they were quadrature and cost like 25 dollars each i think.