The last few weeks have been tough for me both mentally and physically as I’ve reflected on the past decade of West Coast Products. Charlie is glad that we’ve been hanging out more than normal!
I started the business back in 2011 as a 19 year old college student with the goal of making the coolest parts in FRC! Our first items were gears for 1323/973, Raw Blanks, black production gears with this website! We went from my parents garage, to a 2,000 sq ft rental, to our current warehouse. It’s been unbelievable to see how far we’ve come the past 11 years.
I just wanted to take some time and thank the teams & people that have supported us all these years. Without you we wouldn’t be here today. As WCP has grown, I feel like I have grown along with it, as both a person and a business leader. Through this time I’ve made mistakes , but I appreciate the chance this community has given me to fix, improve and change in a positive manner. Here is a link to an open google form for any feedback you have for us ex: changes we can make, new products, suggestions etc…… These will be used internally only.
With that being said……We are making some changes to our product lineup. Please bear with us as this will take some time, but we hope to have the following done before Christmas:
We are discontinuing select components in both WCP & VEX lines and placing them here: Discontinued Products – WestCoast Products. We are starting to get more aggressive with this as we develop new WCP skus, we will be retiring older products.
We have converted some VEX skus to WCP skus that are either currently produced by WCP, bought at cost or purchased from the factory/supplier directly. All skus with the WCP part # do not share revenue with any company; however, some WCP skus do pay royalties to individuals such as GreyT.
We will be changing & diversifying our product catalog within the next year, the process has already started. We also maintain our promise to the FRC community to develop the best products that we can, so keep an eye out for more exciting WCP releases in the future.
New products for the 2023 FRC season will be released starting today until the start of the new season! All of our manuals, kit contents and raw information is transiting to docs.wcproducts.com.
We will be making further changes that will show up in the next 6-12 months. I appreciate all the community support and the folks that have reached out to me the past few weeks. I personally can not thank you enough. This community has made the last 11 years possible, and I look forward to what’s next for WCP in the years to come. New Products:
New for 2023 Season, GreyT Cascade Elevator! We aim to be shipping by the first week of January 2023. Most if not all the components are at our warehouse.
This is our 4th revision of the elevator system and have made large improvements to our previous design. Some of the goals we had:
Forced users to make elevators skinnier to fit gearbox setup
Bending of plate holding planetary gearboxes
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Some Highlights:
Upgraded Clamping Block - The block now has a backwards compatible option to add a second bearing, we saw in 2022 that the .25” ID x .5” OD & 6mm x 12mm bearings did not handle dynamic loading very well. On our Telescope products we have upgrades planned that will fix any breakage due to dynamic loading of the small bearing only. Last year we also got some feedback that the .5” bearing also broke after 60+ hangs on inline elevator block design but no issues by going to .25” ID x .625” OD or .25” ID x .75” OD. So we have added an extended shoulder bolt to allow for a higher loading option.
For this season the GreyT elevator will come stock with the side clamping blocks and will mostly change to the inline clamping block as the standard option for the GreyT kit. These products are made here locally on a pallet system so we can keep up with demand a lot easier. Some 4th axis pictures below for fun!
Secondly, are there strength estimates? I assume it is likely capable of lifting a single robot off the ground. But what about 2? Maybe 3? (I understand this may come down to motor power and not structural strength) Also I noticed that there is no pneumatic brake or at least no instructions on where one could be installed. With a quick glance it looks tricky or not possible to install the WCP Pneumatic Brake. Is there a possibility to do so?
Edit: It can lift at least one robot. In the ratios section it says up to 155lbs, so unsure about above that.
That is correct, I’ll put up a section for ordering. But the jist is you order the 1st stage and if you want a 2/3/4 etc… stage elevator you can buy just the add on stage. We don’t want teams to pay for more than what they need. This was a big complaint with our previous gen models.
Now that I have had a chance to open up the Elevator doc on my computer, I gotta say huge kudos to RC and the WCP Team for putting together such a thorough guide to go along with this release!
Been absolutely loving the online documentation for recent FRC COTS releases. It makes things so much more assessible.
I’d love it if WCP could publish some list / sheet somewhere that shows every 217- to WCP- PN conversion.
We store vendor PNs in our CAD file names or Properties, so having the correct PNs would make BOM exporting easier and remove need for double checking PN matching each time.
Awesome! Martin makes a good trunnion table. with the 4th axis it really does expand capabilities. perfect for a lot of production parts like these.
Question about the elevators and bearing blocks. The GreyT Cascade looks great. However the students and I are debating on the pros and Cons of building our own with the inline bearing blocks vs getting a kit like the GreyT.
Why do the GreyT products not use the inline bearing blocks, and instead use the clamping blocks ( wcp-0323) ?
Also are the WCP-0199 being phased out in favor of the WCP 0897 or ar they just different options. Can they be used on the same elevator? ie one type as the top bearing block and the other as the bottom?
After the 2022 season we spent time doing test hangs (500+) with the 1323 2022 robot to test some updates we were going to across all our products. The main thing we learned from this was the .25" x .500" and 6mm x 12mm bearing is marginal in our product use case and that we need to double up or move to one size bigger .25" x .625".
We were able to easily at that time add an additional bearing/shoulder bolt to the clamping block as shown above. So we invested more resources into mass producing that setup. At the time we didn’t have a good solution to the inline clamping block to allow 2x (4 total) bearings and bolt into our tube plugs until recently (October/November). I know the solution was so easy…
It is easier and cheaper for us to produce the inline clamping blocks as they are done on our pallet system 3 axis mill vs our 4th axis setup. So in the future we will re evaluate (next offseason) to make the inline the default or not. Fwiw my personal preference of blocks is: Inline (Large) → Clamping → Inline clamping.
If you want the option to skip the clamping blocks the easiest way to do it is:
We had a similar discovery in our 2022 climber hook release mechanism. The 0.25x0.5 bearings are really weak, especially as rollers. We upgraded to 0.25" x 0.75" (R4): McMaster-Carr
It’d be cool to see a small explanation or some background info on product descriptions. A lot of teams buy the product but don’t quite know how the design got there. Be cool to see what was learned that led to the design. Obviously not looking for every secret you have, or maybe It’d be cool to have a WCP Q&A that was a bit more in depth. But not during the holidays, I know everyone is just trying to relax.
