I would appreciate some input from anyone that has a very successful “traditional” shooter. By “traditional”, I mean single rotating shaft usually with 2 wheels on it and a curved usually 2 pipe back frame for the ball to roll up.
“Successful” means shoots easily close to tower.
What wheels (size, material) did you use ?
How are you powering it (motor(s), direct or geared etc) and about what is the no-load RPM ?
About how much compression on the ball does your shooter apply as it pulls the ball through ?
We have a traditional flywheel like you have. We used 6" diameter wheels from Skyway. The compression of the ball depends on the angle of your shooter and the distance of the wheels. On our shooter there is about 1.5"-2.5" compression throughout the hood. I have seen other shooters that is alot more. We are still debating between using a miniCIM or a 775pro with a versaplanatery. You want more backspin if you are shooting close to the tower and our RPM has been between 6 and 7 thousand which gives that to us.
What wheels (size, material) did you use ? 8 in gray AM traction wheels for shooting. the front intake feeds the ball into the wheels
How are you powering it (motor(s), direct or geared etc) and about what is the no-load RPM ? naked mini cim coupled to a 5/8 alu. shaft and a encoder set to 3000 rpm for consistency
About how much compression on the ball does your shooter apply as it pulls the ball through ? not to much?? we are set up to shoot from just off the ramp by the castle
make sure the shooter has good barring support and it is well balanced, because at high rpm things can get kinda wild. also having a good centering feeding device is important
We have a shooter like that, direct drive single miniCim, 3" (nominal) ABS sewer pipe with a piece of wedgetop tread, and it compresses the ball a little as it goes through. Make the high goal from about 8-12 feet away.
So we have implemented a direct drive mini-cim, with 4" colson wheels. We have serious vibration as the colson wheels are not balanced. We have inconsistent marginal shooter performance.
I think we have two problems.
we don’t have enough RPM for 4" wheels (not possible to upsize). I’m toying with upgrading to a belt drive to upsize the rpm and save the mini-cim (below) a
the colsons are not the best re stickiness to the ball. As evidence of that we added a say1.5 lb steel flywheel and it made no difference to the ball shooter performance. It must have been slipping. Cleaning the colsons with alcohol helps.
We noticed 5 minutes before bag time that our shooter mini-cim (new this year) has higher friction when hand rotating its shaft but its no-load current draw is not excessive. I’m thinking that means bearings.
Driven by 2x 775 pros geared 1:2 (we run them at 4800 rpm no load), overkill for sure as they only draw about 50% of available power, we were going for consistency & speed of spool up
Compression: ours is a 135° ‘U’ shooter which is more time in contact with the ball than most flywheel shooters, compression starts at 1" and tapers to 2" at exit from the hood
Additional note: we have a 3 or 4 lb solid aluminum flywheel on the shaft to help build up inertia and this improves consistency of the shot
It should be noted that much of this is overkill just to make the shot to the high goal, ours is designed to impart a lot of ball speed at a lower launch angle to improve the range that the ball’s arc will make the goal (currently makes from 15’ out to right up at batter)
cheers and good luck at Toronto central!
*edit: in response to your design, in prototyping we found that a mini CIM needed to be geared up 2:1 to generate enough RPM for somewhat reliable shots. I know this is contrary to my stated RPM above, but the RPM required came way down when we doubled the 775 drive input.
One major factor we found in prototyping was that too much compression sapped the inertia to compress the ball leaving very little left to launch it
Thanks everyone. We implemented some of your recommendations and our shooter is exactly where it needs to be. Re damage to the mini-cim bearings: We took it apart and what I saw was a slightly tight sleeve bearing fit (outer end of cim, inner end has ball bearing). I suspect it would have no implications for normal use and might have eased up with use and was likely a non-fatal production variance.
