We have been trying to make chain tensioners for our floating flex wheel intake but the chain keeps slipping on the on the sprockets. Can anyone give more ideas? We ran out.
Let’s see the intake and what you are dealing with.
To tension the chain when the intake is moving up and down, I would use a variable tensioner. It’s a L-Channel and screwed in the middle to a tower which acts as a pivot point. One end of the channel has a screw with spacers attached, going under the chain. The other end with a rubberband pulling it to whichever direction will pull the spacers to tension the chainer.
If you need a better picture I can try taking one when I go to the lab.
That would be awesome! Thanks!
Ideally, you would mount the driving sprocket on the 1x1 angle so that the distance between the driving sprocket and the driven sprocket is static and does not change length as the arm moves. If you can’t do that then you will need to deal with a chain that at times can be loose enough to skip off the teeth under loads. In that case, you need to be inventive with a small idler sprocket or even an long screw / axle with a vex white axle spacer that can put a bit of pressure on the chain. You could pull the idler wheel / spacer down onto the loose chain with a rubber band maybe. Also using a slightly larger driving sprocket will give the chain more teeth to wrap around while it travels and could reduce skipping. Does not look like you have much space to work with either. You will need to invent, test, iterate. Since you are dealing with a loose chain on the intake area , it will need to be robust and durable under aggressive gameplay and torque loads. Document all this for your notebook while you are at it.
Hi this is a picture of a chain tensioner.
As you can see, the top end of the L-Channel is rubber-banded upwards. With the screw joint pivot point near the middle, the other side of the L-Channel with the spacer inside the screw pulls the chain to tension it.
With this, your motor doesn’t need to move with the intake and can be mounted on the tower while your intake moves up and down.
So I tried your way signacio and came up with this. My main problem is the chain is slipping on the sprockets of the roller. Does anyone have a alternative?
Can you get a clearer picture or more pictures in general??
Simple tensioner looks like this. The trick is often where to attach the tensioner, sometimes you have to make a spot to mount it. Often, that is harder than it looks. Sometimes you get lucky and its trivial. This example is using the most basic supplies. The chain slides nicely over the plastic spacers, even if you tighten the screw so they can’t spin. The tensioner I showed earlier, used a screw and a small sprocket that could spin because it used a nice brass sprocket insert that spins freely on the screw. Fancy, but not necessary at all.
So this didn’t work since the intake frame isn’t mounted directly to the axel that runs the stage two. So any more innovations? I did how ever change out the sprocket for a bigger size. That might work for us.
Is this a floating intake where the chain is tight when the intake is all the way down, but loose when the block lifts the intake?
Pink screw looks awesome, just wanted to say, did you make then or buy from somewhere?
The colored screws are most commonly from https://www.robosource.net/, and there are different colors for each screw length. Here a link to the color coded screws:
Yeah, they look cool. But they serve a far greater purpose. When you assemble things, you can reach for the proper size because you find it instantly by color. Because of this efficiency, you get more done in less time when you build. Also when you tear things down, you put the screws all back in the same bins by color. Keeps things organized and you know exactly what sizes you are low on for re-ordering. Saves time and money.
Yea that’s our only problem thanks
