I’ve been watching and reading the fora for a while but just haven’t posted yet. So after our brainstorming meeting 3 weeks ago, we came up with this design for an intake. So after prototyping the past 2 weeks this is our intake!
Sorry about the video, one of our new members was driving for his first time and the shaft collars holding the intakes inplace came loose so the intakes slid to one side.
I would also like to know how well the flaps work with the 1:1 gearing it looks like you have. From my testing, it seems like this would not work well for Sack Attack, but I may be wrong (in which case I would need to get back to testing).
Have you tried this intake on sacks, and if so, how well does it work?
Thank you for posting, and thank you to others who posted your ideas as well. I like having an open space to share these designs.
We’ve tried a few things and have found the flaps work best. Another thing we tried was the tank treads with the holes in them (i don’t know what they’re called…) with stand offs which worked but didn’t adjust to the different orientations/heights like the flaps do. So I guess to answer your question, yes, there is plenty of friction to intake the sacks.
EDIT(ADDED): Yeah Owen, we have been prototyping with the 1:1 ratio but haven’t played around with any faster gear ratios, but that’s a good idea! We wanted to make sure that if a sack got caught the intake would have plenty of torque to put it through but perhaps we are going a little overboard!
I’ll talk on behalf of Owen. We did have torque problems, but that’s because our intakes pull the sacks down and under, which is why we like our intakes, but we need a lot of torque. Can you intake stacks of the sacks?
We were experimenting with the intake rollers in latex tubing to allow change in height but we took that off because it wasn’t working as well for intaking one sack. One of our builders has our second sack at his house so we haven’t been able to try.
Yeah our ramp/holder will be much different and parallel to the ground, this was just our gateway ramp. I will update on if it works for 2 tomorrow but we have only had one sack for the past few days.
Sorry! There is a video under the pictures now, but i can’t edit to take out the “Video coming soon”. We don’t have a video of it intaking 2 at a time yet though. Hopefully we can get the tomorrow.