Quote:
Originally Posted by PAR_WIG1350
But i believe the point you are trying to make is still absolutely correct, you can't take an old gear box and just replace the gears with those of a different ratio, but the same center distance. You can reuse the gears, but you must make a new box to hold them from a different design.
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Don't forget <R29> when saying this, however. You can buy a gearbox from a vendor for use one year, and reuse the same gearbox the next, provided you didn't modify it in any way, and it's still available from a vendor.
Where this gets tricky is when the gearbox is delivered disassembled. In that case, taking the assembled gear box off an old robot isn't "functionally equivalent" to the condition as delivered from the vendor. To get around that, you have to make it functionally equivalent, like we did last night with 2 old toughboxes... we took them completely apart and cleaned off all the old grease. Thus we return them to the condition as delivered from the vendor, and can reassemble them tonight for use on this years robot.
With this specific example, the students learn more than they would if we just bought two new toughboxes (plus we save a little money). They now know how nasty grease gets after a years worth of use, and the affects that can have on your gears. They now know the affect on the gears of a years work, and that checking them for wear will help prevent unexpected failures down the line. That's stuff you don't learn if you constantly buy new every year - and something the rules force us to go through if we want to reuse these gear boxes.