This off-season, we built almost a direct copy of what we saw from 254. 10DP 6mm thick polycarb racks with steel gears for our intake’s activation. As far as I understand, plastic gears are ok for low torque- high speed applications. Even though our setup is very inefficient, this thing cooks in our eyes.
Reasons for it being unoptimal:
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We have a NEO 550 running it since we didn’t have a full size BLDCbrushless direct current motor for it. (I love 550 for rollers.)
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We have a VP gearbox and 3 (very tight) belts before the racks and pinions.
- Gears meshing with the plastic racks are laser cut.
- We hand filed the polycarb teeth after CNC since our router sponsor didn’t have the needed diameter end mill. This comedic thing was our friction reduction process.
Stars were aligned for it to work bad, but this was the result we got with suboptimal tuning.
It even works fast enough for a 5 cube auto.
I don’t know how much lifetime this thing has or how will it take a beating in comp, but this journey has made me less biased against plastic gears. We need to up our material selection game.