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Posted by Chris, Coach on team #308, Walled Lake Monster, from Walled Lake Schools and TRW Automotive Electronics.

Posted on 3/29/99 6:11 AM MST


In Reply to: Re: What's Breaking? posted by Thomas A. Frank on 3/19/99 10:42 AM MST:



This probably won't get read since it's so far down the list, but I'll go ahead anyway.

We finally got to play in a regional, and this is what happened:

We burned up one FP motor just pushing the puck. Of course FIRST got a good close up of it on the big screen.

We also tore up one FP gear box. We are currently getting more spare parts to take with us to nationals.

I think that the FP motors and gear boxes are great to do what they were designed for - I just don't think robots were in mind during the design.

: : What are people finding to be breakage-prone

: Hello All;

: We've found that the Fisher-Price gearboxes are somewhat prone to failure. The output gear loses
: teeth after a while, and once it loses one, it self destructs in about the proverbial 5 seconds.

: Oddly enough it has occured only on one side of the machine. Since the machine is symetric, this is
: weird, and we haven't yet decided what the cause is. In the meantime, we've obtained some spares (looking
: for more), and we've determined that a failure in a match doesn't really handicap us, so we're not too
: worried about it. It's just strange.

: I guess that's what happens when you use something at roughly twice it's design load!

: TAF