pic: 968's 2006 practice bot chassis

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

If you line up your cross members right, you can bolt on the SS's without any modification to them (besides longer bolts). 973 did that this year as we didn't have the resources to make our own gearbox plates. I'll take pictures when I can.

We did something similar this year with the SS's. We used an exactly dimensioned (with 1/16" tolerance) wooden block with manually CNC'ed holes to represent the SS to get the exact spacing correct while welding. The SS was positioned above the inside frame rail on either side. However, the output shaft wasn't inlined with the middle wheel.

During the design phase it appeared to be more weight to put bearing blocks for direct drive than it was to run more flat AM sprockets & chain, so I went with the 2-chained approach with tensioners directly mounted to the transmission (another bad idea). In hindsight, complexity of maintaining the chain system was what hurt us most this year, so it would have been much more simple to directly drive the middle wheel. We saw 254 & 233's bots in Vegas '07, and saw the simplicity of direct-drive on the middle wheel yet we didn't heed the reasons why. Coulda-shoulda-woulda's aside, maybe it's better we made our mistakes ourselves?

The good news is, we didn't modify our SS's so now we {should} be able to use them again next year if the rules don't change. Now if we could only figure out where this little plastic washer goes on the SS that appeared out of nowhere on our table...