Usign a 2-1/2 bore, 24" stroke pneumatic cylinder.

[indieFan]

My team is using a 2" cylinder with a 24" stroke to hang our robot, but we're having problems retracting and lifting.

We were using a single air tank at the first competition we went to. It was found that gently nudging the robot at the start of retraction seemed to get it going.

We then added two more air tanks and checked the gauges immediately after we extended to see if that was the issue. The high gauge read about 50psi, if I remember correctly, the low was 50psi for a split second and then back to 60psi. We did not have the chance to test actually hanging with this set up.

We took our robot to a practice field, but our controller was not working correctly. To test our pneumatics, we tried to manually trigger the solenoid. This did not produce the results we were hoping for; however, it is unclear if this was due to the manual triggering or a pneumatics issue.

Our robot weighs 77lbs with battery (and I believe bumpers).

My questions:
1. How much time does a pneumatic of this size take to refill?

2. Will the 2nd and 3rd air tanks mitigate the time in question 1?

3. Is there anything else that can be thought of in relation to pneumatics that might need troubleshooting?

Thanks for any help,
indieFan