pic: Mmm ... Greasy Worms :-P

[Jeffrafa]

As far as worm gears go, its a relatively low reduction. We used a quad-thread worm - which really makes it roughly halfway to a helical gear set. This means it is backdrivable, but is notably more resistant than standard gearing. Also the quads appear to be able to take greater stresses than comparable single or double threaded worm gears, although I don't particularly know why.

It is a bronze worm gear with a hardened steel worm, as mentioned in previous posts.

I have checked the numbers as best I can and I think they'll hold up to the abuse that the robot is bound to see, but we'll be running them in and doing some heavy testing in the next week or so to see how they hold up. The biggest unknown is the shock loading like Cory mentioned, so this will be something we will test for. There is still room for some changes if they don't seem to be holding up well enough - but for now we'll just keep those in our back pocket until the need arises.