In our brainstorming, the possibility of using an elevator this year was brought up. Someone else also mentioned the use of a turret… A third person combined the ideas and suggested we could try to climb with the elevator. My initial thought is that turntables/lazy susans are designed with compression forces in mind rather than tension forces, and on McMaster-Carr I only see ratings for “capacity”.
Any ideas/advice/suggestions surrounding this?
I suggest looking into previous robots that have done this for inspiration. Chessy Poofs used a turret/elevator combo in 2019. You can visit their technical binder and look at that information. They have the bearings ID and OD information.
FRC 254 Technical Binder (https://media.team254.com/resources/Team_254_Tech_Binder_2019.pdf)
Climbing on an elevator is pretty straight forward and doable. Putting an elevator on a turret is a very difficult challenge. It has been done successfully (Sniped this is the same 254 tech binder linked in the post above) , but I would not recommend it for the average team. Elevators need to have pretty strong connection points that need to transmit some pretty complex loads to the drive base and you are correct a typical lazy Suzan would not handle the loads and moments an elevator would transmit. Your team would likely need to design a bearing system and structure. Then you still have to figure out all of the wire management and everything else that goes along with a turret.
I’ve seen successful turret/elevator combos, I actually had the 254 2019 pdf open. My question was more along the lines of climbing with the elevator if it’s mounted to a turret
Code Orange also did an elevator on a turret in 2019. The bearing system for this turret was a thing of beauty.
As the other posts above have said, this is a non-trivial exercise and should not be attempted with a lazy susan style turntable. I would also not recommend this unless you have good machining capabilities and are able to manufacture a substantial structure similar to these examples. Also, it is pretty late in the build season to be starting a large design and manufacturing project like this. It would need to provide a pretty substantial benefit to your game strategy in order to undertake that level of risk, IMO.
Take what I say with a grain of salt as it was from a friend (and former mentor) of code O but after 2019 I heard they swore to never do a turret again because of that robot
Stamped steel Lazy susans are compression devices.
Aluminum turntable bearings (two rings with balls between them) will handle up, down, and moment loads. Try to keep the loading slot out of the load zone if you have a choice.
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