How to make a Neutral gear with BallShifters?

[craigboez]

There are 6 balls within the ball shifter, three for each of the two shifting gears that engage. If you remove the three balls for one of the gears, that gear will never engage, effectively leaving you with a neutral position.

[Mr V]

The easiest way to do it is to not install the drive gear for the low gear stage and put a spacer or even a much smaller diameter gear of the same width in its place.

You can do it by removing gears and/or balls from the driven shifter cluster but the spacer trick is quick and simple if you want to keep the high gear.

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Mr V

You can do it by removing gears and/or balls from the driven shifter cluster but the spacer trick is quick and simple if you want to keep the high gear.

Along the same lines- just remove the balls from the high gear so that the plunger has nothing to clutch into for that gear set.

-Brando

[James Tonthat]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

Along the same lines- just remove the balls from the high gear so that the plunger has nothing to clutch into for that gear set.

-Brando

You could machine teeth off the gears so that they never mesh.

[GarrettF2395]

Originally Posted by craigboez

There are 6 balls within the ball shifter, three for each of the two shifting gears that engage. If you remove the three balls for one of the gears, that gear will never engage, effectively leaving you with a neutral position.

My team did this at Thursday meeting for our prototypes. However, the transmission had some difficulty properly engaging and disengaging.
We were running it without load and shifting by hand.

We're going to take it apart tomorrow and see if we notice anything buggy in the system.
If that still doesn't work, plan B is to create a neutral for our super shifters.