How long did it take for you to build your drivetrain?

[Bill Gold]

Here has been my history with drivetrains in FIRST…

In 2000, as a junior on Team #258, we completed our drivetrain in three weeks. It was a simple 4wd chain and belt driven system run by the ole 3/8” drill motors. The reason it wasn’t completed earlier was because we had very few members of the team, and were working simultaneously on the ball mechanism and drivetrain.

In 2001, as a senior on Team #258, we built pretty much the same 4wd drivetrain as 2000 (but completely with chain and sprockets) in 2 weeks.

In 2002, as a college student on Team #258, we built a 2-speed shift on the fly sprocketbox drivetrain powered by just the CIM motors in 3 weeks, and then spent another week lightening it up significantly.

In 2003, as a college student on Team #258, we spent the first week and a half designing our swerve drive system powered by both 1/2” drill motors and the CIM motors (and rotated by the Globe motors), and then we didn’t complete it until about a week before ship date. We took our time on it because, since it was a simple game, we didn’t really have any other mechanism on the robot. We ghetto-rigged some wings on Thursday of SVR. If we had really tried we could have had the swerve designed in half a week, and then had it completed somewhere along the third week.

In 2004, as a college student on Team #258, we spent about a week and a half designing our “stretcher-drive” system powered by the 1/2” drill motors, and finished it about a week from shipdate. We would have finished it earlier had we had more than 3 people machining parts along with parts we outsourced to a machine shop. There was a crapton of machining on that robot for a team of just a handful of us. It was a lot of fun to work on, though, looking back on it.