pic: Championship Upgrade

[Tom Ore]

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[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

What is it used for? If i may ask

[Mark Holschuh]

That is one nice render! My memory is that this was used to join the ends of the lift chain and adjust out the slack in the chain.

[Tom Ore]

Yes - it's to tighten the chain. The problem was in the initial CAD layout we left 4.5" for it but didn't have a particular design in mind. Just seemed like 4.5" was enough. Toward the end of the build season we added a conventional turnbuckle style with eye bolts. This came out 5.5" long and the elevator wouldn't travel quite far enough. We had to jockey the bot around when totes were coming down the chute.

After week six, our lead mechanical mentor came up with this design to get the 1" of travel back. Now the totes fall out of the chute into the bot just as sweet as can be. Our OPR went from 85 to 104.

The lesson is, saving a couple of seconds many times in a match ends up being a big deal.

[audietron]

I remember at the scrimmage you guys telling me that if we found a smaller way to tension chain other than a turn buckle to let you guys know. I did not realize it was a big issue. I will have to remember this for future years...or just use belts

[Tom Ore]

Originally Posted by audietron

I did not realize it was a big issue.

"big" depends on your point of view - 85 was a decent OPR to start with. Being able to push it up to the 13th highest in FRC was pretty cool.

[TD78]

Very nice! I happened to find these from Misumi while stumbling through CD a few months ago, and they worked out well. The end caps are the opposite of yours, and were a bit tricky to get together using the Dark Soul #25 chain tool...but once together, held up quite nicely. They were pretty cheap too.