[Ken Streeter]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

...Working together with Banebots, FIRST, and the ChiefDelphi.com I believe we are closing in on a set of solutions to this issue. Based on my communications with Ed Yackey from Banebots, folks from FIRST, and many in the larger FIRST community, I can assure you that everyone is committed to working this issue to a successful conclusion. ...

Plan A:

New harder (RC 23) carrier plates. Hardness equal to the hardness of the output shaft. ...

Plan B:

New harder carrier plates (RC 23) with square hole (rather than round with double D) Plus modifying or making new output shafts with square drive. Should give approx. 2X increase in max torque over Plan A.

...

2-CIM motor:

It is my opinion that Plan A will possibly address most of these failures but in order to fully address this issue for teams that are using 2-CIMs, we may have to go to Plan B.

Joe,

First off, I want to say thanks for all that you, other volunteers in the FIRST community, and Ed at BaneBots have been doing to resolve this issue. We are confident that those involved will ensure that an excellent solution is arrived at for the problem with the 56mm gearboxes.

Our plan since seeing the 56mm gearbox in the KoP was to use the 56mm gearbox with the 2-CIM adapter and 16:1 gearing for our robot drive system. We based our decision to do this largely upon excellent experiences we had last year with the use of the BaneBots 36mm gearboxes (5:1 and 25:1 in low-load, high-rpm applications for our robot's shooter wheels and ball feed roller in "Aim High"), presuming that we would have similarly happy experiences this year. We purchased all the needed components for the above, as well as enough of everything to equip a complete 2nd drive base.

We have not yet tried driving the robot with the 56mm transmissions, so our carrier plates are still undamaged. I have a few questions that are probably shared by many other teams, so I'll ask them publicly so that all can benefit from the answers:

1 - Should we drive our 2007 drive base around (even though this will almost surely damage the carrier plates) for our testing so that we can proceed with robot testing even though we'll be damaging our currently undamaged carrier plates? i.e. Has it been decided that the eventual solution will involve giving new carrier plates to teams at no additional charge?

2 - We presume that the solutions will be applied not just to KoP 56mm gearboxes, but also to 56mm gearboxes which teams purchased from BaneBots?

3 - As one of the teams planning to use the 56mm gearboxes with 2:1 adapters and 16:1 gearsets, we'd like to know if we can help influence the decision to use Plan C for teams that purchased 2:1 adapters? (We view Plan B as a risky solution for 2:1 adapters and 16:1 ratios when used in the dynamic loading situation of robot drive.)

Thanks again for all your effort and that of so many others on this. As a team with almost no machining capabilities (we build the robot in team members homes), we're very relieved to see that the proposed solutions won't require our team to have parts machined or heat-treated!

Thanks again,

--ken