Quote:
Originally Posted by dtengineering
Not all scissors lifts need be slow. Team 639 built a scissors lift that could extend to grab "the bar" in about one second back in 2004. http://www.team639.org/index.php?page=r2004
What was more impressive was that it did this from a fully collapsed state. Anyone from 639 care to give some specs on how you did it?
Jason |
We were able to build a very fast pneumatic scissor lift in 2004 using two 1.5" bore pistons. I'm not sure of the exact stroke length, but I know it was somewhere around 10". The lift itself was made of 1" square tubing members with occasional cross braces. However, the system we created was not very sturdy, and was meant to be used more than once in a match. Ideally, it would never be dropped back to its retracted position using the pneumatics - doing so sent it crashing down extremely quickly. It would be possible to prevent this, but the entire assembly was fairly fragile, and we ended up bending and having to replace nearly every part of the lift at least once over the course of two regionals. That was without lifting a load. Also, the pistons we used had to be very large to give us enough force, meaning it drained our air tanks to about half pressure every time we used the lift. Granted we are able to use twice as many tanks this year, but it is still a significant amount of air for a single lift. With modification, it may well be possible to create a similar system able to be used repeatedly - that is one possible design our team has considered. However, we've come to the conclusion that there are definitely better solutions.