pic: Concept 6W Drive Train

[Deke]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

We mill our WCD siderails on a manual mill for reference.

Also, bumper support on a WCD doesn't need to be complicated.

As for interfacing to mechanisms, how is it more difficult with a WCD?

We ran bumper supports similar to that and milled the rails manually. Our wc drive performed awesome last year, no issues. By the end of the season the bumpers were all smashed in at the top from no framing support and became more difficult to install, that's my beef with it. It also took a bit to get framing supported for mechanisms, there just isn't alot of framing on a wcd. Most of the framing required alot of attention throughout competitions. It's all fairly minor complaints, i don't have an issue doing a wcd again but i think a different approach could free up resources for us.

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Here is a good exercise...

Design a few drivetrains, give them all a good honest effort (otherwise you're just wasting your own time and lying to yourself).

While designing, do your best to optimize all the variants for your resources. Publicly post them for review. Invite BRUTAL commentary, take this in stride and incorporate the feedback that makes sense. If you have enough experienced students, mentors and possible sponsors that can offer review, the public part could be skipped.

At the end do a fair comparison of the different options on the criteria that matter to you; fab time, difficulty, cost, etc...

Going into nearly every season we have designed a swerve, west coast, plate sandwich drive and the last few years butterfly/octonum. We constantly reassess them to better suit our ever changing resources, and compare them on the merits we care about.

It's unreasonable to anecdotally link it to a drive a good team ran. Using that logic ANY drive can be proven to be the best.

I'm confused who this information is for, isn't this the exercise we are going through? I enjoy the commentary and feedback, I am hoping it helps. I'd prefer feedback on pros and cons/strengths and weaknesses, versus design process rhetoric.