I recently read a thread about West Coast Drive, and someone mentioned that it’d be better to use a custom gearbox for a West Coast Drive, but my team has no experience with making custom gearboxes, and not enough time in the current build season time to make gearboxes and a robot. We don’t meet as often during the off season, and rarely during school brakes. Does anybody know where we can find gearboxes that work for West Coast Drive, or how to mod the given ones to a West Coast Drive?
Thanks!
P.S. It’a not that we don’t want to build our own gearboxes, but we don’t have the time/know-how/parts to build them. We are planning on getting some workshops in for the coming year, since all of our mechanics graduated, and they were the only ones who ever built custom gearboxes.
Well, if you don’t meet so often, then start meeting more often. Off-season is a wonderful time to do community outreach, test out ideas you don’t have time for in regular season, and generally bond with the team. It’s a much better time to do bonding in off season rather than when you’re stressing over a robot. Back to the topic, use an old gearbox from a past season, meet at someone’s house, and just work on learning the gearbox. Then machine some parts for a new custom gearbox. And, of course, put together the new gearbox.
If you get the SS’s or Toughboxes with long shafts, you can use them in a WCD quite nicely. Due to the ratios available for SS’s, it would be best to use 6 or 8" wheels because SS’s have optimized ratios for those wheel sizes. Toughboxes have ratios available which can be used with 4" wheels as well.
Someone else will have to give an unbiased answer…
That said, our SS Adapter Kit utilizes all of the original AM SS components. We have simply replaced the outside plates and housing with custom aluminum plates.
We also substitute an AM long key shaft for our purposes.
It comes disassembled, so ease of use compared to a stock SS may be slightly lower.
