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Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski
would the gains that you would recieve by elongating the contact point be worth the effort of setting it up so that you would have a overall greater velocity? (i.e. some sort of pulleys/belt system)
Or is the small contact point more than enough to accelerate the ball to an ideal velocity?
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Hi Steve,
I don't think a long contact point is a good idea, unless you have to move the balls. We have found that the launch seems to be most efficient with a "point" loading of the balls. Again, we are using a single wheel to accelerate the ball, and a plate to "aim" it. I believe that the longer contact point will just waste energy. Our testing seems to corroborate this, as regards the ultimate range of the shooter. The whole compression, viscoelasticity thing kind of came up just for this reason. I might have thought that a long, gradual acceleration with minimal ball compression (because less normal force is required for friction) would be more efficient than a short, highly compressed shooting zone. Not so, surprisingly to me.