[Matt Reiland]

Originally Posted by Crazy

Thanks for your explanations Andy and Sanddrag, that answered pretty much all of my questions, especially the teknocats cutaway. One thing I'm unlcear on is how are the idle gears kept in place? It seems to me that you could only put spacers on the outside of the gears beacuse the dog in between would make retaining them on the inside impossible. Does the motion of the gears keep them in place, or is there a better way of doing this that I'm not catching on to? Surely something is keeping them from moving on the shaft.

On a different tangent , what kind of bearings are used on the teknocats cutaway? If the red is hex shaft, how is it inserted into the bearings in the middle of the shaft? I'm assuming even if those sections are lathed, it would be impossible to move the part of the shaft that is still hexagonal through the bearing. Are they special hex bearings or something? I thought those didn't exist, but again, I'm probably just missing somethign obvious

Thanks again for all the replies, it's greatly appreciated!

You are on the right track, the bearings are flanged and they 'PRESS' in from the side opposite from the $@#$@#$@#$@# dog. The drive shaft in this case is hex in the area that the shift dog slides on and round where the gears are. Now, the gears with their bearings can only move in up until the hex area. That is what keeps the gears from collapsing inwards towards the dog. Also the picture in Sanddrag's was ours from 2003. We have since went to a fork shifting apparatus using servo's instead of pneumatics. We also changed the dog fingers to be more like Nitro RC vehicles (Larger sweep engagement) you can now literally bang it into gear over a 70-80 degree range instead of waiting for the 3 fingers to line up more precisely.