Locking gas springs - legal?

[runneals]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

After a quick review of the manual, I'm inclined to say that locking gas springs are legal. I just wanted to poll the forum before we started sinking a lot of effort into the idea.

We used a gas spring in our 2016 robot to balance the (long) intake / scaling arm. We're hoping to improve the setup by replacing the gas spring with a locking version (unlocked with an air cylinder pulling the remote release) to hold the arm angle without motor current.

These are the types of products:
http://www.mcmaster.com/#gas-springs/=131wqob

http://www.geminigassprings.com/inde...hk=1&Itemid=12

http://www.bansbach.com/index.php/en...elease-systems

My team that I mentor LOVES stored energy! When I was a member in 2013, we first tried with Kraken, but we were unable to get that to work, so we ended up attempting Narwhal, which sadly was deemed unsafe as our winch cable snapped a couple times during retraction (both used non-locking gas springs, so we had to get creative and design our own locking mechanisms).
This past year we got some of the locking gas springs, which were pretty sweet in that we didn't have to worry about having to design a mechanism to lock them when they were charged. Both years I think we used a maximum of 500lb gas springs (on Narwhal we had 1,400 pounds of gas springs - 2x500lb & 2x200lb). Have fun with one of the safest forms of energy around! Once you release it, make sure there's nothing in the way, because it won't stop once it's going