After a district points disaster at Tippecanoe, Iron Kings got busy rectifying the key flaws on their 2017 machine. Key changes:
- The gear holder actually works now! Flop-out wings, PG27 on a linkage to kick them out onto the peg. The stud at the bottom of the holder clocks the gear for our best chance to get an easy spear, and the slot is extra-wide at the lift height for more fudge factor.
- Shooter has been taken from 3 balls wide to 2 balls wide, to give the lift plenty of intrusion room. We also moved the wheels to get a consistent hit on the ball instead of the wheel-two gears for weight-wheel setup we ran at Tippecanoe.
- Shooter back panel was changed from plywood to a frankly ridiculous amount of aluminum. If the bomb drops, there will be cockroaches, Twinkies, and this thing left. But we had the weight and we wanted the stiffness.
- Infinitely better grasp of programming and our sensors (thanks, Alan!). We expect to have a center line gear going pretty early on, and perhaps more if/when we start feeling frisky. Additional cameras have been added to ensure we trigger the gear deployment (and hopefully the shooter–we’ll finish our unbag time tomorrow night) at the right time.
- Our reliable climber, intake, and elevator systems are basically unchanged as of press time. We have a couple visions on how to speed up the climber, but we want to ensure higher-priority projects get knocked out of the park.
We know Perry Meridian is do-or-die for our state championship hopes, and we’re going to come at it with everything we’ve got. See you Thursday!
We haven’t done more than 10 minutes or so of testing on the shooter, so there’s going to be some tweaking ahead. But we were the ones to christen the Indiana boilers at Tippecanoe (perks of being Q1), and we fully expect this to break up some would-be ties this weekend too.