Last Anvil 2024-2025 | Product Releases & Updates

FIRST General Forum
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Introduction - Last Anvil Innovations (www.lastanvil.com):

Greetings, Innovators!

Last Anvil is ecstatic to begin its second season with the FIRST Community! We are deeply grateful for all of your support last year, and we cannot wait to see what this coming year has in store.

Goals:

In reflection of last season, our primary goals this year are to (1) build deeper relationships with teams in the community, (2) expand our selection of high quality parts that exceed the demanding needs of competition and (3) identify opportunities for collaboration.

Products:

Our 2024-2025 product line includes:

New

Existing

Be on the lookout; we will be posting weekly photos of our new products.

Some of you may notice that Patterned Tubes are not included on the list above. For the 2025 season, we have postponed production to reallocate resources to new product development as well as other endeavors. We hope to restore their production in later seasons better than ever before.

Shipping:

We are glad to say that we now provide shipping (1) through FedEx to teams in the United States and (2) to Canada via UPS (see shipping policy for terms). It is our hope to refine our international shipping process throughout the season and make it easier for teams.

Sponsorship: Team Anvil

It has been an immense privilege to work with #TeamAnvil during the pre-season, and we are excited to see what our teams forge during 2025.

Also, we are thrilled to announce three final members of Team Anvil:

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If you are interested in joining Team Anvil, we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter (bottom of the page), so you know when the next round of applications becomes available for 2025-2026!

Conclusion:

As always, here’s to a future filled with innovation and collaboration!

Best Regards,

Last Anvil Innovations – Harvey, Ben, Chris, and Patrick

Follow Us:

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:eyes:

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Excited for 751 to be a part of Team Anvil for its first year, and excited to support a newer vendor as a product tester!

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I’m afraid I don’t grok the open-loop belt tensioner. How does that work?

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Agree these are sweet!

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One suggestion on these (in case you make any revisions down the line): If there were additional thru-holes for mounting (or perhaps a separate mounting bracket that could be used instead of the second clamp), these could easily serve a dual-use as a way to attach a moving mechanism to a belt drive.

Over the last few years we’ve had a variety of belt-driven elevators on our robots that used clamps that were very similar to these, but fabricating them and tensioning was always a pain, so a COTS solution would be great.

Incidentally, have you guys done any load-testing on these clamps with standard HTD belts? Looks like you’re getting about 3-4 teeth of engagement from the pictures which isn’t bad, but from our experience there definitely is a limit to what HTD belts can take before the teeth sheer off.

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At least that’s what comes to mind first.

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We will follow up with a few use cases to help give you an idea! Also, we are working with Team Anvil to produce “How To” videos on all our products.

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Similar question on loading on this part, but my concern is the bending in the 10-32 tensioner screw, given that the tension load is cantilevered.

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Good points! We thought about implementing such a design, and we will definitely take it under consideration for version 2 or a variant. The feedback is much appreciated. With these, our market analysis pointed towards the need for compactness, so we made certain trade offs in the design to achieve that.

We have done internal testing, and we felt they were ready to launch. However, nothing compares to the demands of competition. At the moment, they were manufactured under a short-run, so we could remain agile and respond quickly to team feedback.

Team Anvil will be conducting further testing on the field.

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+1, doing a quick and dirty FEA is showing that at 100lbs, which I feel isnt unreasonable for an instantaneous force like running an arm into a wall, shows a pretty bad safety factor for a 316 SS bolt (.21 SF).

(bolt will permanently deform ~.030" at 100lbs spread across the teeth)

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As these are already made, you might just be able to send along a .5" OD Spacer with them to clamp between the two blocks. This could transfer a majority of the force bending the bolt into compressing the spacer.

(the point probed is the leading edge of the bolt with 6x the safety factor as no spacer)

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While tedious, you can either washer stack to add a little distance or grind some of the spacer length off to get closer to the right tension.

Note: ALL FEA should be take with a grain of salt (unless it was done by Andy Baker), this is just proof of concept.

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Even Andy Baker is not safe from FEA salt.

How was the contact simulated, as there can be some extremely unpleasant stresses resulting from contact. And what material model were you using for plastic deformation, as the bolt could just outright snap under these loading conditions.

I’d also be wary of the stress risers of the sharp internal corners, they will get subject to bending forces, and will likely initiate fatigue cracks if they aren’t another failure point.

Additionally, I would’ve used different boundary conditions, as fixing the top block prevents it from rotating which would really happen. Symmetry can also be used to reduce the number of elements required for any given accuracy.

I’d just in general question this clamp however, as this design has numerous sharp internal corners which are massive stress risers and difficult to analyze accurately due to creating singularities. If it were me designing this, the bolts would be placed to the sides of the belts, and there would’ve been 2 of them.

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I set all “touching” surfaces to be welded together . which is far from reality, but the simulation generally shows that the bolt is the weakest link by far. I didn’t feel the need to make it any more accurate than just to test the lever arm on the bolt and show that a spacer would drastically increase strength.
If it passed internal testing its probably good enough for 70% of use cases, I see no point in completely writing off the only (I think?) cots option available to teams for open loop belts.

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Immensely appreciate everyone’s feedback - I’ll take the concerns back to our team and follow up with any updates. Fortunately, this product was designed in a manner that would allow us to change pace, depending on consumer response. It seems compactness may not have been as desirable as we had initially forecast.

My hope is that we can get a variant in process to give teams optionality in the design they’d like to choose and feel most comfortable with.

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We are excited to be part of Team LAI this year. We cant wait for folks to try out our bearing hat collaboration, it is based off something we have 3d printed for bots in the past and know we get to see it in Aluminum and hope teams that try them out enjoy them.

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Team 5675 is at your service! This should be a very useful item. We are looking forward to testing it.

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As a tensioning mechanism alone, compactness is definitely preferable, so I wouldn’t take our feedback to be critical of that choice nessesarely, it’s more that there are more potential applications for a piece of hardware that does both tensioning and facilitates mounting to a mechanism (don’t get me wrong, teams could certainly make these work for that with some minor modifications, like manually drilling additional holes or drilling out the threaded holes, but that’s obviously not what you guys intended for them).

I do also think the load concerns (particularly with the 10-32 screw) are valid too, but it’s possible the use-cases you guys were envisioning for these were much lighter-duty than what people here have in mind for them (I know I’m not certainly above throwing 100+lbs of load through a belt drive on a mechanism).

Personally, I think it’s great you guys have been so receptive to feedback from teams and look forward to what you come up with next! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Update 12/26: Good news - we have a variant version of the open-loop belt tensioner that we are comfortable with launching now. It was originally developed along side the version we launched on the 23rd. We are happy to say that it will handle high-load applications and provide teams with more optionality in packaging.

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The Reinforced Compact Open-Loop Belt Tensioner will be available for purchase at the end of January. Additionally, the STEP file can be found on our website.

To note, our team is hoping to incorporate other elements of team feedback in later versions of the product or a newly developed one.

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Odd question, Why not just use a Alloy steel bolt which has 170,000 psi yield instead of a 316 Stainless bolt with has a 70,000 psi yield. Granted it will move the deformation point to somewhere else, but it will increase the load and It is an easy way of getting a bit more performance out of the system.

There is little reason to use Stainless bolts inside of FRC, With the lower strength and the galling. They just are not worth the trouble.

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because sometimes you read McMasters website wrong… (I probably switched the two in my mind when writing the post)

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