Will they ever stop breaking?
Anyways, I have been asked to find a way to try to fix the broken bands. I was wondering if anyone had figured out to fix them. I noticed at the Traverse City competition there were 2 ladies constantally repairing them. Do you happen to know what they were doing to fix them? I sadly didn’t get the chance to ask…
Thanks,
~Abby, 288/216, Robodawgs~
they might of been using rivets…at least thats what we did when ours broke…
I am not sure what they were doing but these orbit balls are connected by two hooks. If you push the fabric out of the way, you will notice that where they connect, there are two little hooks that basically grab on to the other. Once you do that, cover it back with the fabric and should be good. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if you glued or duct taped those joints.
Someone probably has a better method, but this was my little thing throughout our build season.
Our team had some good luck using pop rivets to re-attach the broken bands together.
If that doesn’t work, then try for some adhesive between the broken sections.
They were likely repairing them with a plastic strip and plastic rivets as described here:
http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles/Orbit%20Ball%20Repair.pdf
Can anyone testify how well this holds up, it seems to work well on the webcasts. IDK about how well they hold up in the competition, has this affected teams designs.
the Rivets look like they are solid…
And are the balls really held together by hooks? thats actually kinda sad…
lol
the rivets seem to me to be really solid. I saw balls at the midwest that where pretty much held together by rivets and they seemed to be perfectly fine.
i think definatly
we even had to space the lexan on our helix in one inch so it wouldent jam
does the riviots effect how the balls bounce, roll, or how it spins in the air, Ect?
The Only Thing the rivets effect is How the ball compresses, It will not compress much with the rivets in it.
To Keep them from breaking, 904 Creston Riveted each place a band overlapped each other. That should help keep the good ones you have solid and not broken.
Good Luck!!!
Sadly yes, they are held by basically two pieces of plastic overlapping each-other slightly with little holes cut out so you have a few prongs that latch together with the hooks on the other. Then this joint is superglued very slightly I think so the glue cracks and the ball falls apart. I never got a pic of how they stayed together. That being said I became proficient at reattaching the balls through the fabric.
I took a few balls at practice today and way toying around with the joints on a ball with only one “good”, unbroken band still left… I put togeter 3 more, meaning that the balls [if seen early enough] can be fixed before being destroyed…
Very True. We made about 90 orbit balls during build season for our pre-ship scrimmage, and used rivets. The balls were much stronger than the competition ones, and worked well for most teams at the scrimmage, but they were actually too stiff to work in our conveyor system. They would track the belts right out of the pulleys and actually caused us to burn up 2 motors:eek: Needless to say we felt pretty silly for creating something better than the original that ended up breaking our robot! 
Hold on a second…Do the people repairing the balls at the competition use rivots? Does that mean that you should think about that when building your robot? Because if that is what they use during competitions, you should have your robot able to work with that… Because I know that there is some amount of compression the balls go through when going through many bots…
Read post #5 above. First published an ‘official’ repair procedure.
oh, I must have missed that ^^
Does anyone know how much the rivets affect the ease of compressing orbit balls?
How much do you plan on compressing them?
By the end of the NJ regional I’d say quite a few balls were fixed with rivets but they still worked fine in our system. We compress balls by about 1/2" to 3/4" in our intake and scoring mechanism. We didn’t notice any adverse effects or anything like that.