Earlier today, a teammate of mind was kicking around some ideas and decided that he wanted to build something that requires a four stage linear lift. We’ve never done one, though, and I’m curious if that’s something worth doing, or is even possible. We’re mostly curious if they’re prone to leaning forward or to the side, and if they’re relatively easy to maintain.
Also, how many sprockets would we need to build this? We’ve never built one of these before. What size would we use? Are the 6-tooth ones big enough, or do I need a bunch of 12-tooth at the minimum?
Can someone who’s done this before clear up some of the questions we’ve got?
We have tried to build them before but they never worked perfectly. It kept getting jammed at the top, so it could not come down. You will need 2 6 tooth sprockets per level + 2 for the bottom for a total of 10 sprockets.
The main problem is that if you want to get under the bar, you need to be under 12 inches. The linear slides are 12 inches. This means that you would have to cut all 8 sets of slides in your 4 stage life. Vex does not make these sliders any more, so I would not cut them, so they could be used in future years. If you wnted to you could have the lift tip forward or backwards so you could get under the barrier without cutting pieces.
If you build them well they will work great. Look at this site: Videos and Pics of Robots - 1200 Syntax Error
Scroll down to the bottom and look at Syntax’s lift from gateway. Or look up 1200F from gateway. They both had linear lifts that nearly never jammed.
Or you could look at 1103 from roundup and look at his sprockets. In my CAD of 1103 album there are close ups on the lift. Here is a link:[
Not sure where you saw that they are built with C-Channels. A linear slide requires both.
I did a four stage for gateway and we used rope and pulleys we saw that when dealing with that much chain it would sometimes jump and jam on us. We attached the rope to the bottom of our last stage and it was great it had some lean but that was because it had a 5 lbs weight on it, if you have lean you could always adjust for it at the bottom of the lift by adding spacers. we also learned that using the smaller green slider attached to the bottom of one channel and the slide on the other works great. I hope this can help and it depends on how tall each stage wants to be as well.