telescoping arm

[Craig]

Hey Guys I'll shed a little light on our arm from 2003

It took 4 solid weeks to work out all the bugs in the telescoping mechanism. No pulleys or cables in that arm either. We used "fish tape" which is commonly used for running electrical wires thru conduit. it's like a 15' long piece of spring steel about 1/4" wide that we moved with two rollers. When retracted the tape was wound up inside the big brass ring that you see on the side of the mechanism. To tell the truth that thing was a pain in the $@#$@#$@#, it worked really well but only 60% of the time. That is until the bot fell on the mech in the first practice heat, from that point on it worked so well we could shoot the smallest extension like a spear, Almost lost my head the first time it happened!