At the new product unveiling, I saw some new shaft accessories including an 1/8" clamping shaft collar. In case you don’t know, the clamping action gets a lot more grip on the shaft than a set screw, so it’s good for high force applications. But… we have square shafts. It’d only be useful for high loads along the axle, preventing things from sliding off.
Why do we need these? I can’t imagine anything properly designed that takes this kind of load that couldn’t be done with the old shaft collars.
I’m pretty sure that the new clamping shaft collars were made to fit on the new high strength shafts, seeing as the old shaft collars don’t fit on the new shafts.
There are clamp collars now available (or coming soon) for both the high strength 1/4" shafts and the normal 1/8" shafts.
High Strength Clamping Shaft Collar (1/4")
Clamping Shaft Collar (1/8")
One advantage these new clamp collars have in addition to an overall better grab on the axle is that these cannot vibrate loose. VEX designed them using an 8-32 screw and a nylock nut, which means there’s no way they can vibrate loose. This is not a feature that standard shaft collars had.
I love these new collars, I only wish they weren’t quite as wide, but that’s the price you pay to be able to use the nylock nuts I guess.
-Nick
Now they need to design a new motor or insert for a motor to directly use the nex shafts. I feel an even more powerful motor on the way :eek:
With the new sizes of rods and possiblity of even more gear down the road, I can’t imagine a barrier this time around. The new rods and new gear opens up the door for extreme power in our applications. 
Shaft converters would be nice for direct drive. No more bent drive axles.
I believe they said that a motor should not need a 1/4" shaft directly to it, because if it was getting that much torque it’d slip first anyways. I also don’t think there were shaft adaptors or couplers, just collars.
I don’t see why you couldn’t just loctite the set screws on the old collars. And as I said, you should never see any application where you need it to stop it slipping along the axle.
The reason they made them is more for convenience. It was very easy to strip out the old set screws (and they seem to always end back up in the pile of new set screws :mad:). They also had a tendency to get loose, sure you could locktite them but that tends to be a pain while prototyping.
Team 24 typically uses a 3-32 screw as a replacement for the setscrew in the collars whenever possible. Sometimes this didn’t work, because the screw would stick out too far. However, these new clamping shaft collars seem fairly large, so I doubt it was any bigger than they are.