Dart Actuators

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey,

I know this is late because bag time is at midnight tonight but has anyone else having trouble with the cart actuators from Andy Mark? Ours came grenade and something is wrong with them because the shaft which is what the actuator pushes up is spinning on ours :ahh: We were wondering if we can fix this somehow?

2

Picture or video available?

3

I don’t know how to send a picture or video. Can you explain please?

4

In order for the dart to work, the shaft must be “guided”, meaning that its rotation must be constrained by the load it is pushing. In that way the acme nut is able to translate along the acme screw…otherwise the rod actuator just spins with the acme screw and the tube unscrews itself inside, right out of the slide block. Withhold it and bring it to the Triad Zone and we can help you rebuild and apply it. Also, we learned in Stronghold that the dart is well designed for pushing, but has deficiencies when pulling, i.e., the drive end can pull out of the drive sprocket, bearing and lock collar. There too we can apply a modification that will make it more robust. We had AndyMark in our pits at world’s doing a post-mortem on our failures and thankfully saw the design deficiencies and supplied us with parts to get going again.

5

We used DARTs back in 2016 and decided never again… we had so many issues with that. Whenever that happened, we would have to disassemble the actuator and replace using the retaining clip at the bottom I believe and the bearing too. We ended up designing a new bottom plate that had a massive bearing that coukd handle the shock. We went from having to replace the actuators every match to never touching them again once fixing the first time at Worlds.

6

If our actuator would slam into its lowest position it would get locked, and the CIM wouldn’t be able to rotate fully. When this happened it required a full disassembly, and manually cranking on the gear.

7

So nobody else is concerned that their DART came as a grenade? :rolleyes:

8

Autocorrect, methinks. :rolleyes:

9

I’m concerned that I can’t figure out what word(s) was replaced with grenade

10

Premade

11

Have you called AndyMark about it? Or sent an email?

12