Ball Knocker Advice

[Browzilla]

Here's our basic setup so far. We've got about a 4'2" 1.5" PVC Tube set to be mounted to the kitbot frame at about 5" above the ground. We plan to knock the ball off with a telescoping PVC pole.

We /had/ planned to run it up using the black ribbing in the KoP and the gears provided, which if we measured correctly should give us about a 3:1 gear ration and about 26"/sec.

While assembling yesterday, we came across a slight problem: our setup yesterday had used 2" pipe with 1.5" inside, with a track milled out because the ribbing wouldn't quite fit into the 2" pipe.

After this, we're strongly considering a winch and pulley. It's simpler overall, I think, and we could still gear up the spool; in order to get the same 26"/sec I think we need about a 2" spindle.

I'm asking here whether any of you teams with more experience can advise us in either direction. The milled pipe wouldn't be to hard to fix, but the winch is looking pretty good right now too.