pic: WCD

[rees2001]

Originally Posted by rcmolloy

How about the idea of no bearing blocks at all?

This was our approach last year also. We did do a few things to help prevent the loss of a chain. First of all our chains were all internal, placed inside the 1.5 x 2 frame rails. We changed our chains before the start of our second regional, before Championship, and again before IRI. We have had the same chains on since IRI which includes MANY hours of demos, Beta testing, drive practice, and the Ruckus.
Overall we didn't see much wear on the sprockets but the chain does stretch quite a but. We have looked at adding a chain tensioner to the system. If the chains were external I would look into a system to tension the chains.
Cutting the frame rails with exact c-c and not worrying about additional machine time for bearing blocks is nice. It gives us time to work on other aspects of the robot.