For my team’s disc shooter, we were thinking of using a gear system to angle our shooter. A 72 tooth gear would be attached to the shooter and a 14 tooth gear would be spun by a window motor and turn the big gear. The problem is, the small gear we have has a hex shape hole and won’t fit on the window motor because of the shape and because its too big. Do we have to buy a gear specifically for the motor or is there something we can do so the gear will fit?
You have to either buy a gear to fir around the window motor, or you can machine/order a hub that fits around the window motor and that the gear mounts to.
The KoP includes to adapters to convert the window motors in the kit to a keyed shaft. (See KoP checklist page 3) I believe it is a 5/8ths shaft, but I am not sure. Remember that if your shaft has a large OD, you can always drill out the inside to shave off a lot of weight, depending on the stress on the shaft. You could, as we have done before, adapt these collars to the plastic gears included in the Fisher Price gearboxes from past years. Unfortunately, we didn’t receive these this year, but I’m sure that if you don’t have one, a local team will. I know we have a stockpile of about 15 to 20 of them.
You are allowed to modify the little plastic piece on the window motor. We grinded it off one year and pressed a sprocket onto it.
Now and days though we just laser out a custom plate-gear with the “shape” of the window motor output piece and press them on. Easy is you have the resources.