3 Cim ball shifter output shaft

[autox_vette]

Yesterday during a practice scrimmage, we lost all drive on one side of our robot. After checking all of the obvious, nothing was found to be out of sorts. After several more minutes of head scratching, I happened to notice that the gear on the output shaft of one of the gearboxes (3 Cim ball shifter WCD output) was shifted. It appeared that the output shaft had shifted out of the gearbox far enough that the gear on the shaft was no longer contacting the gear on the axle. I pushed it back in using my fingers and everything was OK.

I haven't had time to dissect the gear box to see what was going on (and I wasn't part of the team that initially assembled them). Looking at all of the drawings on VexPro's web site, it looks like the output shaft just pushes into the shifter with nothing holding it into place. Is there supposed to be something holding the output shaft in place?

It's something that is going to go onto our pre-flight checklist for sure, but just wondering if it's something wrong with our gearbox or an engineering oversight...

Kenton