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Re: Catapult issues with boulders
We are shooting with wheels this year, and I feel your pain. We have had issues with jamming competition balls all year. What really toasts my goats, is we ordered comp balls from the manufacture the day of kickoff. The called a week later and said they needed to substitute a "like" ball to willful the order, which we accepted, and they came in orange. We played week 1, and had shooter issues with jamming, we ended up burning up 4 775pros, so we redesign was in order. We had better success at week 4 until eliminations when the introduced all new balls. Again jams. I understand that game piece variability is part of the engineering challenge, but we have not even been able to buy an actual game piece since week two so that we could test the redesigned shooter.
To that I call foul.
Off soapbox.
To me, the issue with the new balls is the stickyness of the coating, not squishyness of the ball. So it appears that you use a vacuum generator to hold the ball, the funnel and the hose. I do not know your sequence, but I would look at making the vacuum a little less effective with a new ball. maybe some slits in the funnel? Maybe releasing vacumm prior to shooting, then move arm? Maybe move the vacuum funnel towards the bottom of the arm.
We shot with a pneumatic catapult in 2014, and the angle is all about release point. It seems the old ball is moving from the pocket before the arm hits the hard stop, where the new ball is still sitting in the pocket a little longer. You may be able to choke up on the shooter a bit and force the release point to happen with the hard stop of the arm, and gain some consistency. Not sure how that impacts making the goal.
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The sooner we get behind schedule, the more time we have to catch up.
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FIRST cannot enforce Gracious Professionalism on the participants in this program, you will have to do it on your own. - Ken Leung [more] 
12-04-2016, 14:30
Hybrid Mode
