Gear intakes with a rolling compliant wheel on top and a ramp on the bottom like this were really effective last year, and something similar may be effective this year.
I understand the wiring bump is going to catch just about anything, but last year how did teams keep their scoops from catching on the carpet and every other imperfection?
Is there some sort of trick or does the polycarbonate scoop just slide along on the floor?
It just slides so long as there is hardly any pressure pushing down into the carpet. Think like only enough pressure to have the lexan sitting on top of the carpet.
We used very thin polycarb to get under the gear and it worked well. It did happen occasionally but was never a real problem.
Ours caught sometimes as well. What we did was put some E-tap on the edge and that helped as well. We also didn’t have ours flat but at an angle which’s caused some of the catching problems.
Occasionally ours was a third wheel that affected steering and I’d remind new drivers to default to having it up until you got closer to gears.
Our scoop was the thickest document cover you could buy at Walmart cut into a 6x8 strip and folded in half, then VHB taped to the aluminum plate bottom of our mechanism. You could tape the top/bottom slightly different to change the shape of the bevel. One reason we did this instead of just polycarbonate was that it was easy to replace but it pretty rarely needed to be replaced during competition. During driver practice it took more wear and it was replaced most during that time. A few times a driver would leave the carpet and try to come back with it down and that was pretty funny when they got caught. It was effective enough you’d find washers or other carpet debris inside it. But never really a problem for sliding along. The center bump should not be an issue as long as drivers don’t forget!
If you have a belt sander, you could put a chamfer on the leading edge of the polycarb so you’re not driving a sharp edge into the carpet.
We used very thin material and had a mechanical stop on our cylinder so that it just rode along the carpet. The cylinder pushed it down just enough to be on the floor without much pressure.