After 3 competitions, each design we have had has been a bust. This most recent failure was due to an unfortunately flawed gear ratio on our lift. I will post pictures later but what we had going was two motors on both sides powering a high strength metal gear, with an idler, and one gear connected to the lifting arm. Anyone have better lift designs that wont explode in a shower of nuts and bolts?
If you post pictures I might can give you some help. What gear ratio are you using and what speed (high torque, high speed, turbo) motors are you using?
Try to make sure everything’s spaced right so there is no side-to-side motion, use nylocks on areas that experience lots of stress, make sure that the shafts are supported as close to the gears as possible to prevent bending, and make sure that nothing is getting caught on your lift. How in the world did you get something to explode in a shower of nuts and bolts?
Why do you have an idler gear. That’s excess friction that you don’t need. Directly put the high strength gear to the lift gear. Since you have 4 motors, it would be beneficial to try a 1:5 torque ratio. If you have any questions just post them here.
I cannot see any pics. So I don’t know the size of the idler gear here. But two reasons, we have used idler gears are 1) because a 12T steel gear meshes better with a 36T HS idler gear than it meshes directly with a 60T or 84 T(and the 36T idler gear meshes better with the 60T or 84T driven gear than the 12T drive gear); and 2) we can use 1/4" shafts on larger gears that resist bending and accordingly skipping.
This was really the claw, and we fixed that issue already (although the tension on the lift itself was so high that screws popped out left and right and it was causing us a massive headache >.<)