Curved shooter mysterious hook.

[stryker0603]

I'm not sure its the compression that is the problem. My team has a curved shooter with almost an inch of compression using pneumatic wheels for shooting. It might be that pneumatic wheels are needed for that much compression though.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by stryker0603

I'm not sure its the compression that is the problem. My team has a curved shooter with almost an inch of compression using pneumatic wheels for shooting.

You may be comparing apples to oranges.

It might be that pneumatic wheels are needed for that much compression though.

With a low-pressure pneumatic tire, you don't get an accurate measurement of the compression of the frisbee by simply measuring the gap between the tire and the fence, especially if the frisbee is passing slightly underneath the tire (as it does in many pneumatic-tire designs)

[team4384]

In the past discussions everyone has been talking about compression how much is too much etc. Last year the basket ball was more compress-able than the hard plastic frisbees. Thus it was more forgiving. If you compress the frisbee 1/2" or more, does it not buckle/bend upward? If you don't have guides, the compressed frisbee will ride up. It was recommmended by others to provide support from the top to prevent frisbee from poping up. Guess what, in addition to wasting energy in compressing you are adding more friction, slowing down the frisbee. Every frisbee is not alike,some have little more flexibility than the other (even if the frisbee is molded to 99% accuracy), one frisbee will not shoot out as the other one. When the frisbee exits, these anomalies add up to your frustration.

Many teams are using 8" pneumatich wheels, if you do so, make sure its not fully inflated, you should be able to press with your thumb to make about 1/4" deep dimple. If your thumb goes in more, the wheel is under-inflated. Since pneumatic wheel has rubber sidings, the wheel will get compressed more than the frisbee, hence firsbee will not lose its shape. Also the rubber wheel will give enough traction to push the frisbee out. If you add velcro or fiction tape on the guide rails (other side where frisbee contacts), it will increase the traction on that side, causing frisbee to spin. The spining frisbee will fly relatively straight (horizontally) and will be more consistent. This you need to expriment and find out the best combination, combination of wheel pressure, this distance between the wheel and the guide rail.

If you are using 8" pneumatic wheels, make sure they are balanced and do not wobble. If they do, try to add counter weight (typically opposite to the brass inflating valve), again you have to expriment this, unless you have access to balancing machines (not the one in Belle Tire). Anyways, balancing is required for anything that spins at high speed.

Since you are using the solid wheel from KOP, my recommendation is to tape the velcro (soft side) to the wheel, it gives you enough compression and adjust the distance between wheel and the guide rails so you get about 1/8" compression. without any support from the top, if you can turn the wheel with your hand and frisbee does not ride up, you should be good. Try with different frisbees.

[RB73]

We actually had a similar issue when we were building out shooter. We didnt have a roof and the disks were raising out of the shooter rather than going out the end. We ended up raising our shooter wheels about a quarter of an inch. This put the wheels slightly above the frisbee and acted as a top. This, when paired with a lip on the opposite wall, stopped the disks from riding up out of the shooter.

In other words, compression wasnt an issue in the disk coming out tilted.

[EricH]

The real question is, is it reliably hooking in one direction? If it is, do you think that you can harness that hook to get around opposing defenders?

If it's doing something reliably that isn't what you expect, you could tweak it to make it work right, or you could simply adopt that and move in another direction.

[Jeffy]

We noticed the frisbee likes to ride up on the wall or the wheel. Added guides to both, minimized the aforementioned problem.

For you, try angling the wheel slightly so that the frisbee does not want to escape upwards out of the shooter.