Anyone lost thier BaneBots Carrier pins?

[Donut]

If teams are worried about this, I would just run with the older plates until you fix the new ones. We saw this thread before our regional and decided to switch back in the old plates and hope they held up. They lasted fine through all 11 matches we played, but we hope to have the new ones fixed and switch them back in at the beginning of the Championship.

We ran them using a 2 CIM per side setup, but we have a highly geared robot (12 fps speed on our wheels), so we didn't do a ton of pushing (still, they held up shoving trying to shove 60 and 842 out of the way to score, and they're beefy drive bots).

[Gary Bonner]

If the pins were full length, might that have kept them from coming out, i.e. there wouldn't be room for them to move?

[dapub]

We lost our pins in one gearbox during our 5th match at UTC today. But, actually, we used the new hardened plates during the BAE NH regional, too. So, a total of around 15 matches to fail. The other 3 haven't gone yet, I brought our new carrier plates to the Machine Shop at UTC today to get welded. There is no welding equipment there, but the guys there offered to bring them back to their shop and give them to us first thing tomorrow morning. So, it looks like pulling all 4 gearboxes in the morning, and hopefully we'll be ready for our first match.

The old carrier plates failed totally after running them for a few hours before we shipped.

Does anyone know if new gearboxes shipped after a certain date have both hardened steel plates, and the correct pins?

[bhsrobotics1671]

1991 -
according to the banebots site they are shipping with the new hardened plates but as of now they are out of stock. I have gotten word that they are trying to fix the pin lengths as well so when are they coming back? i don't know, all i know is that when they do everything should be good.

[evanisthat!]

We lost our right side in the second semi-final match at UCF. Somehow, 1902 and 179 pulled off a win in a 2 vs 3 match against 233, 180, and their other alliance partner. We were unable to get the new transmission installed before our time ran out and they needed a replacement. It was INCREDIBLY disappointing to open up the transmission and see that the carrier pins had simply fallen out. Such an issue is, I find, unacceptable. We are moving back to the old, softer plates, and welding the drive shaft in so we don't have to worry about these issues. I am disappointed in the continuing lack of consistency and reliability from these transmissions. Oh well, it’s too late now to change it...

[X-Istence]

As an Ex-FIRSTie who enjoyed watching the Phx regional, I have to say I feel sorry for all the people with trouble. My old team for this exact reason designed their own transmission, and have used that ever since. We don't change them between years so that we can interchange parts with old bots without having to buy spares. Cheap .

[jskene]

During a fix-it window, we replaced the short pins in the new plates with longer ones from the older plates, holding them in with Loctite 680. This take only a few minutes and can be done with a hammer and a center punch.

When we arrived at the Chesapeake regional to install these plates in our gearboxes, we found that the new, hardened plates we had installed prior to the previous regional has lost their pins.

We had lost the second round in the semi-finals, fortunately. It would have been really dissapointing if we had won it, and gone on to the finals. Our robot would have been dead on the field.

I strongly recommend that any teams using these gearboxes change these pins.

[jskene]

After getting to the finals at the Chesapeake regional (and losing to a very strong and worthy alliance), we dismantled our gearboxes to see if our long-pin / Loctite 680 fix had worked.

In a word, no.

On one side, 3 pins had worked loose, and on the other , one pin. Certainly this is much better than with the stock hardened plates with short pins, but not up to a full competition series - we only played in 14 matches, whereas one could play in 17.

We plan either to weld the long pins in place or to drill new, undersize holes in the new plates and press fit the old pins into these holes.

We won't know how our plan works out until we have run many matches in Atlanta.

Hope to see you there.

[whytheheckme]

We lost all of the pins in one box during matches on friday. That night, I had the other spare set of plates that we had welded an ground down. On Saturday morning when I replaced them, the one box had all the pins missing, another had one missing, and a third had 4/5 missing

Beware teams.... Beware!

Jacob

[jskene]

I'm not sure that I understood your comment. Did you mean to say that the welded in pins also came out?

[Ben Piecuch]

We decided to follow Team 237's advice and spot welded the back of the pins to the carrier plate. The welds stuck up a little (maybe a 1/16th of an inch) but it cleared the outer housing, so no grinding was required. When we went to re-assemble the plates, we found that at least one of the pins on each of the carrier had lost its perpendicularity, and kept jamming up the stage. So, we ended up running both gearboxes with only 4 of the 5 planet gears in them.

We ran 10 matches, 4 practice rounds, and about a hour of practice on the practice field -> No Failure! We haven't taken them apart to confirm their health, but I'm fairly confident that they held together without losing any pins. We'll be double-checking for our post-season comps.

Best of luck,

BEN

[whytheheckme]

Originally Posted by jskene

I'm not sure that I understood your comment. Did you mean to say that the welded in pins also came out?

I'm sorry. I just re-read my post and realized that it was confusing. Let me re-word that.

We lost all of the pins in one box during matches on friday. That night, I had the other spare set of plates that we had welded and ground down so that they were ready for installation on Saturday morning. On Saturday morning when I opened the gearboxes, the one box had all the pins missing, another had one missing, and a third had 4/5 missing. The fourth was intact . After replacing the carrier plates with the new welded ones, we have had no problems.

Beware teams.... Beware!

Jacob

[Jeff Pahl]

Originally Posted by Teched3

With respect to the transmissions that will be coming, Banebots tells me they will have a 2nd revision hardened plate in them with properly sized holes. They are also considering putting tie bolts from the mounting plate corners to hold the plates square and tight to the tranny housing. The 8 screws don't presently do a good job of this.They cannot offer just the revised plates, as the manufacturer will not provide them. Looks like you will have to buy the whole transmission assembly to get it. That could change after the season, as time is short, and they are trying to meet the demand for Nationals. Who knows, by next year, they may have square holes and a square end on the output shaft as shown by Joe Johnson in some posted drawings, and make these transmissions the standard. Stick with these guys as they are willing to listen and make changes.

We were having a lot of trouble with all the set screws in the housings coming loose every time we drove. We took some 1/2" thick bar stock and used it to tie the two black square plates on the transmission together. After that we never had a loose screw (13 matches plus practice time). The transmissions were mounted to a piece of plate that the shaft passed thru. I don't have any pictures right now, if anyone wants to see one let me know and I'll take some tomorrow when we uncrate the robot.

[edthegeek]

1351 lost the carrier pins on both our transmissions during our second match of the seeding rounds at SVR. When we first heard of the initial problems with the carrier plates, we had our machinist reverse-engineer the original plates and had them made out of higher-strength steel. This gave us the correct tolerances and the correct length pins. We had the new plates by then so we flipped them out in about half an hour. It cost us that match and the next one (we had to queue about 3 minutes after the match in which they failed). I have yet to open up the gearboxes and see how they are standing up, but they did not fail for the rest of the matches.

[DonRotolo]

Does anyone think that instead of welding, a good hit with a center punch in the pin end flush with the carrier plate will tend to swage the pin in place?

Don

[EDIT]: The thought is that you support the far (sticking-out-and-holding-the-gears) end and give it a healthy whack. The pin shouldn't move, but the end of the pin should expand slightly by the displacement of metal from the ding in the end of the pin. BUT one must consider how hard the material is (can it deform elasically enough to increase in size) and whether the carrier plate will 'grip' a pin enough using this method. [/EDIT]