Mark your calendars and be sure to tune in to twitch.tv/andymarkinc for our 8th episode of AM in the PM on Thursday, December 13th, at 6pm ET.
As promised in last week’s Winter Product Launch, Andy Baker and Nick Lawrence are going to give you the scoop on the brand new Raptor Track Drive system. We’re very excited to share the details with you!
Additionally, thanks to Richard Wallace, we got to do a fun experiment this week. We’ll be presenting those results to you on the show.
We hope that you will join us in the chat for live Q&A and a chance to win a $10 AndyMark gift card!
If you aren’t going to be able to tune in live, but have a question for Nick or Andy, you can also ask it here and we’ll try to work it in.
At 6:00 PM, Dark Sky forecasts it’ll be 30 and feel like 23 in Kokomo. Will Commander Canada survive a cannonball into such a frigid pool with a 57 Sport below? Find out tonight!
Well… I got a surprise while picking up a parts order today.
Let’s just say: You do not want to miss seeing how this little science experiment played out! :eek:
They had way, WAY too much fun with this!
P.S. If you ever have the chance to pick up your order, do it. You never know what the engineers at AndyMark are up to. (Game hint seekers & conspiracy theorists need not apply.)
There were people here who were seriously concerned about this testing causing a crack in the floor. Thankfully, no cracks were made, nor AM goats harmed.
Did you finally find a use for all those 1" steel balls that wasn’t “Give them to John so he can leave them on on the floor for me to trip over”? I assume those are the cannon balls. If not, please someone make a little cannon to shoot those.
There is still time for me to film shooting something with my cannon by Thursday at 10000 frames per second. I have a lot of BAG motors and some dead CIMs… I might be able to track down an older AM planetary from a KOP.
A 6 inch clear HiGrip with 77A durometer tread, or so it appears. I don’t see the clear option on the AM website, so the one on Nick’s desk might be a test sample.
Lil goat seems to prefer the flavor of bowling balls. Looks like she’s doing fine after biting off about 30% of the one in the picture.
Yep, one of the first of the “b” version we had made. We have started molding new parts in clear first to check for air bubbles and inconsistencies that you can’t see before going into mass production. They also make really cool demo pieces
I still want to make Rhino(Raptor) pulleys in clear poly. That would be cool. Might talk to the mold guys about doing a limited batch of like 20 that way some time.
While your aluminum pulleys were outstanding, more to the story is needed here. We ended up making a very quick change to the polycarbonate pulleys after seeing some pulleys in the field break. We altered our mold tool and made new pulleys within a week. These ended up being our “rev4” pulleys, provided to all of the teams who needed new versions. These stronger pulleys were used by the majority of the teams who used Rhino Track Drive in 2016, and have been used successfully since.
We have not broken any Rev 4 pulleys. All the breakage we did see was caused by impacts that would be extreme in any game other than Stronghold. That game beat many robots into submission – ours died in its very last match. It eventually beat the field elements into submission, also. That was as close to Battlebots as I ever want to see FRC.
In less than 1 hour we’ll be live in the AndyMark studios in rainy Kokomo, Indiana to tell you more about our Raptor Track Drive, and then to give you the results of our high impact testing of the Sport Planetary Gearboxes.
If you have any questions for Nick and Andy, let us know here before we’re on air, or join us live in the chat on twitch.tv/andymarkinc.
