[Peter Matteson]

I'll try and answer as much as possible.

We TIG EVERYTHING in the 177 shop. We have Miller Electric machines that UTC Power, sponser I for, donated when we down sized our factory space a few years back. The person who does most of our welding is one of the our recieving inspectors who used to weld pipe and tube in the shop. If you saw our robot this year that was all 1/16th wall box welded. We didn't pop a weld.

We used the output of the kitbot tranny as our low gear. After the UTC scrimmage we discovered that we needed a high speed. We utilized parts designs from our 2004 transmissions so we could save time and make the these in 2 days. Do to this I only had 2mm key to use to lock the drive shaft to the output gears. We knew this was the weak point but didn't want to weld everything in place in case we needed to service something. The failure Kim and Greg mentioned is the key shearing. This wouldn't have been an issue if we had had the correct key to begin with.

Pete