It doesn’t need to. Derlin plastic (for the spacers anyway) seems to be suffieciently frictionless, so you don’t need to have it spin.
I think those white pacers are made of nylon - but your main point is exactly correct.
thanks for the tips, gonna try it out.
Well, I’ve found a solution, and I must thank everyone for their help. Thankfully these resolutions improved my autonomous mode, structure, and control system in general. I’ll just leave it to: nothing expensive or extensive, just some metal and some bumpers :p.
Now that I can give my say from use, I have found that sprockets are more for pressure applications and transferring energy over a distance, while gears are for systems requiring durability (drive and lift systems). Of course there’s always new ways to do an age old problem.
However, there’s one thing I’d like to ask - so may people posted, but many more voted for sprocket that didn’t say why. Are there more reasons? A lot was said, but I get the feeling theres more there thats not being said. Does chain drive have some magic advantage over gears?
I voted for chain and I did not post.
I am not entirely sure of the mechanical reasons behind sprockets and chains, but I have a few of my own.
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Weight - When you create a gear drive that runs gears up and down the side of your robot, it’s better to have strong chaining doing the running for you. It saves weight and time.
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Materials - To have roughly 5 gears lined together, you need 5 gears, axles, collars, bearings, etc. For a chain it’s two sprockets, 4 bearings, 2 axles, and chain.
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Gear Stripping - When a chain slips or snaps, it either skips over a tooth or it snaps off. Generally the repair can be easy. With gears, this can involve replacing an entire axle-worth of parts.
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Pricing - I do believe that chaining is cheaper, in the long run.
BUT the reasons above are primarily based on FRC experience. In VEX, IMO, gears are the best, and I primarily use gears, but I have not played with the high strength chains. I don’t know if they can handle a drive or not, but the response I’ve gotten so far is positive.
chain is also nice and easy as far as swapping out different ratios. i usually calculate my ratios so i rarely change them but if you need to change gears you usually need to change the position of the motor to fit the new gears in while you can just leave some space and use chain and then easily swap out ratios. i know there are a few gear ratios that easily swap out but i think this is still a valid point
Sunny, it sounds like that would be more for other applications. The opportunities and benefits of chain are vast, yet when the small chain VEX chain is not too reliable for all applications it kinda loses usability value. Also, I hear that the heavy-duty chain is a little awkward in drive systems, so from experience and word it seems like chain wins overall (and in VEX for non-drive apps), but for VEX gears are more reliable for drive since they’re a solid mass and not easily broken (and if they do break, they’re easy to replace and/or its a design problem that wouldn’t break gears if done better).
As for what DinerKid said, I agree about the space issue and the easy exchange of ratios. When working on one application I had something where gears where unreliable and unpractical, so I doubled up some classic chain and sprockets and used them. Since I found that I needed more torque while having reliable speed, swapping out sprockets was a breeze, especially in a strict design that requires lots of distance between application of power and power result.
Hey just voicing my input here the team im on has always gone with 2 motors in the center driving a big gear and then two slightly smaller gears connected to the wheels to the smaller gears. if you use a chain you can setup the same thing but if you have your gears bolted onto slide you can always tighten one side up to fix the problem of one side going faster than the other.
I like chain drive over gears, but our team most always goes with direct drive so there is no loss of efficiency 
direct drive is usually pretty nice
If your HS chain isn’t relatively straight, will your drive train generally over heat more often than with straight HS chain?
chain drive and gear shift
My team has only used Chain Drive. I have experimented with a Gear Drive, but it is not as flexible as the Chain Drive.
I prefer Chain Drive just because of the freedom you have. It also looks cool
Wow, a resurrection of a 2009 thread. I personally like high strength chain because it doesn’t slip as easily as gears (without lots of pressure holding them together), but it also introduces more friction, and slightly increases the lag between motor movement and wheel movement.
I would rather make my base with HS chain and sprockets in stead of spur gears. It’s cause I can easily change my ratio, at various times.
We like using gears to combine the motors’ power and then power a single sprocket so it’s easy to change the ratio like you said.