This topic was first brought up by Duncan MacDonald from team 6364 and all credit should go to him for discovering this important way to preserve the life of our notes which we all recognize are a precious commodity.
1678 took Duncan’s advice and found that by rounding the edges of our shooter wheels we extended the life of our notes by a significant amount with no noticeable effect to our shots. Because of the shortage of notes this year, we thought it would be good idea to reiterate the problem and describe the solution so we put together this technical brief:Rounding of Shooter/Intake Wheels for Note Preservation. We hope the FRC community finds this helpful.
Is it supposed to be a demonstration of rounded wheels shooting a game piece, or a demonstration on how to physically round the edges of the wheels? The former is what loads for me.
As teams have been using the ARC practice field, I’ve been suggesting they radius or chamfer the wheels in their intakes and shooters. I’ve also been suggesting they modify any guides designed to center the note in the intake so they aren’t effectively knives that will slice the note if you drive over it rather than center it.
if we do make a switch, I will make sure we follow this advice.