We have had many inquires as to what type of shooting mechanism we are using. We wanted to get our bid to regionals before we released it.
This video shows the fire rate of our first gen gear box. It can easily be sped up to fire 5 balls per second, but speed kills. Finding the balance between the shooter and intake is the key. You can obviously see that it is a slip gear. This iteration was 36s powering a 60 tooth.
This video shows how accurate the mechanism can be. I intentionally loaded the balls slowly because we were not able to move over to the other side; our programming for that will be finished by our next competition.
We believe that this is one of the most accurate type of shooting mechanism for full court shooters, that will not be affected by battery power/voltage.
We have made several changes/improvements to this mechanism and do not, at this time, wish to post them for everyone to see. However, if you are a “rookie” team who would like to build this type of shooter but need help; we would be more than happy to send you a video showing exactly how to build the shooter. Just message us and we’ll send you a link.](https://youtu.be/Mtbsmnz9IJI )
I think that most rookie teams won’t have enough access to the vex forum to reply or send a private message to you. Maybe add your email to a reply so that they can contact you if they need to.
I’m glad that you’re trying to help out the newer teams.
Funny that you should say that, because we just joined the forum a few weeks ago. This is only my second year. Noah, my only other team member, is in his second year as well. Our team email address is: [email protected].
We will be releasing the entire robot after the December 5, competition in Greenville. We will be redesigning it after that competition, so we will video it as we pull it apart. We wanted to give the rookie teams a few weeks head start if they wanted it.
I joined at the end of last year, one of my team members joined at the start of this year, and my third team member joined last week. The team is in grade 10, 9, and 10. Do we count as a rookie team even though we can score well enough to be tournament finalists at our only competition?
Since the majority of the teams that asking for the complete video are middle school, we have decided to release our current mechanism. We really want to see what some of the “senior teams” can do with it. If any of the “rookie” teams need help with their intake, we will be glad to take ours apart and show you how we put it together.
This is our current gearbox:
3 - 12 tooth gears powering a 36 tooth gear
60 tooth slip gear with 3 slips
60 tooth hammer gear
3 standard speed motors
In this video you will see exactly how our current gearbox is put together. You will also learn what you need to do to build your own. This gearbox is very customized and will not be a simple build, but you can build a simpler version that will work just as good or better than this one. We built this gearbox out of the parts that we had on hand, because we couldn’t get the 60 tooth gears that we needed over the weekend. Our original design was 3-36 tooth gears powering a 60 tooth, but one of our 60 tooth gears broke because we forgot to put the metal inserts on one side. This particular gearbox is very slim and if that is what you need, this design will be perfect. If it doesn’t need to be this slim, the 36s to 60 or 36s to 84 will work great. Keep in mind that you can also change your gear ratios by either changing the motor gears or by changing the slip gear to hammer gear ratio; i.e., 60 tooth slip gear and 84 tooth hammer gear or 84 tooth slip gear to 60 tooth hammer gear and so on. You can experiment with this after you get the motor side of your gearbox built. Remember the slip gear attaches to the rod that is attached to the gear being powered by the motors.
The way we originally tested it, the hammer was more like a bat. We had the gearbox in the air and the hammer swung just like a bat, that was the gearbox in the 7 second video. Our upper intake chain was in the way so we mounted the gearbox on the robot to swing like a hammer. We really liked the bat design, and have talked about going back to it, but we believe that it will get in the way of our future lift.
