Custom Vs. COTS Transmissions

[artdutra04]

Many of the teams who have "custom" gearboxes simply simply take COTS AndyMark gears and rearrange and/or repackage them into custom housings. Usually this is done to reduce weight, facilitate mounting and integration into chassis/mechanism, or to obtain custom gear ratios by swapping out gears. 228 has used this style of custom gearboxes for several years now, mostly in drivetrain applications. This is pretty easy to do, so long as you have accurate machining capability (CNC mill, laser, punch, etc).

Actually designing a fully custom gearbox and machining gears from raw gear stock isn't much more difficult, but is a lot more time and resource intensive. We did this last season on 228 for one reason, and that was that it was still faster to do this than wait for Banebots gearboxes to arrive.