Best Way to Launch unusual items?

[Rman1923]

My team has usually used a wheeled shooter. The wheels we have used, however, are magical! We call them marshmallow wheels, but they are actually wheels for conveyor belts. What makes these wheels special is that they are made of a toughish rubber that when you spin with even a direct driven mini-CIM or CIM, they expand. So they sell these in 4-in diameters, but when they are spinning, i think you can get them up to 6 inches. These wheels were ideal for 2013 and 2014 because you wouldn't need suspension on the shooter to account for the give that the balls had and the Frisbee had a more consistent flight with these. I'm sure if we had gone with a tote shooter idea we would have used these wheels to shoot them onto stacks .

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[asid61]

Originally Posted by Rman1923

My team has usually used a wheeled shooter. The wheels we have used, however, are magical! We call them marshmallow wheels, but they are actually wheels for conveyor belts. What makes these wheels special is that they are made of a toughish rubber that when you spin with even a direct driven mini-CIM or CIM, they expand. So they sell these in 4-in diameters, but when they are spinning, i think you can get them up to 6 inches. These wheels were ideal for 2013 and 2014 because you wouldn't need suspension on the shooter to account for the give that the balls had and the Frisbee had a more consistent flight with these. I'm sure if we had gone with a tote shooter idea we would have used these wheels to shoot them onto stacks .

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Which one of those did you use?

[Dominick Ferone]

Originally Posted by asid61

Which one of those did you use?

I was about to ask the same thing

[Rman1923]

Originally Posted by asid61

Which one of those did you use?

Sorry, I must have linked the wrong thing, We used the Sure Grip Rollers, We tried the Neoprene (Black), but that doesn't expand as much as the Nitrile (white) which is what we used for the past two years.

By the way, we discovered these wheels from 2590 in Hatboro Horsham 2013, kudos to them!

[Bennett548]

Nitrile sure-grip wheels are simply awesome. Except for the price.

Hot tip! They are cheaper, and there are more bore options available from the manufacturer: http://www.fixtureworks.net/Home/Ord...path=9|0|4|2|3

[JesseK]

If you don't care about precision landing sites and have a PR team who are pros at getting landowners to let you recover your device, a High Altitude Balloon can launch any lightweight items you can dream of. A few of my colleagues are getting into this at work, and I've suggested that launch windows be every 6-1/2 weeks so we have a nice consistent set of deadlines to aim for.

It may also take longer than a single match to come back down, but depending on how good (or intentionally bad) your engineering is, you can easily fix that.

[Dominick Ferone]

Right now we're working on hockey pucks, but seeing as one years game could have a multitude of shapes the question arose.
For multiple unusual shapes what works well?
Then the argument was what's a different way to launch the pucks.

[GeeTwo]

If you want an unusual challenge, try to build something to throw pool noodles. Maybe you could enter it as a "robot player" in one of the human vs robot exhibition matches this off-season.

[BariSaxGuy]

You should try using a pneumatic cannon, but make foam casings for what you're shooting that come off when you fire it, sort of like a shotgun shell.