I’m not looking for cons, I can infer plenty of them, but I’m looking for pros of scissor lifts from experienced users. Why are scissor lifts so infused in VEX Competitions? What can they do better than other lifts? Why do so many people use them, especially this late in this season?
They use them cause they dumb
Butt ha-whyy
A scissor lift is what we stared with at the beggining of the season, it only took an hour and a half to build and it worked well. As the season progressed we had multiple discussions about changing lifts but we ended up deciding to focus on increasing proformance with our current robot. With a 1:7 lift ratio using four speed motors we have what I would consider a very quick stacking time for a scissor lift and that plus our four bar that allows us to stack three cones without moving the lift allows us to be a pretty good robot for skills (4th in our state currently) we’ve been extremely competitive with other teams from our state/region and we plan on putting out a reveal next week to show off what we think is a pretty fast scissor lift robot. That being said we haven’t gone up against any truly fast RD4B’s although I do believe we could be competitive, we’ll see how we do at state but we’re expecting good results.
What made you chose scissor lift originally?
We had some trouble getting a RD4B working over the summer. As a team we have some experience with scissor lifts from past years so when it got to the time for us to start building our competition robot we decided to stick to something familiar, our plan was to start with that and change lifts later but we ended up liking what we built and decided to stick with it.
Scissors can be built a lot wider with more room for you to do a mobile goal lift or secondary lift in the middle of your robot. Theoretically you can fit as many stages as you want but more than 3 is completely useless if you want to have a light robot. The biggest issues is that they are heavy and require a lot of torque to operate. The are also very hard to stabilize without PID, so I would recommend using PID for it if you plan on building one. I prefer building double reverse four bars because they can be a lot lighter, faster, and easier to stabilize. Though the teams I know who have scissors have decided to switch to dr4bs.
I think the main reason is because they are easier to build than DR4Bs. They also seem to take less resources so it’s more convenient for new teams that still want to build something that isn’t really bad.
I’m sure beginner teams would be better off with a very fast Mogo bot rather than a possibly crudely put together scissor. I have seen the latter and it is not pretty.
Because scissor lifts are used everywhere, so vex ppls be coping them. That’s why.
As for pros over other lifts there is only one:
I will respect you greatly if it goes up and down.
There are some more beginner level teams in my region that have built some pretty impressive scissorlift robots given their experience, I think it just depends on how much work a team puts into the design.
I’m From 8110x and we have ran with a scissor lift all year since after our first comp in early aug. We like it because it is consistent and reliable. We have been successful overall being very comparable to faster teams but i’m sure that as the competition progresses we will max out speed and then be a little slower than the other designs but we like it. Proof scissor is meta: quals with a dr4b: 4-3 quals with a scissor: 37-0
lol jk we know that scissor isn’t meta this year but its still been really good for us.
the proper spelling is skizzors. the other spelling is something completely different and not appropriate. I hope you are aware of that.
The reason why I think so many teams use skizzor lifts is that they appear simple to build. Building a semi-decent skizzor is easier than building a semi-decent DR4B. However I would say making a high level DR4B is much easier than a high level Skizzor.
They definitely seem easier to build but when you’re mid match and it hits you with that tilt out of nowhere it’s not very fun 
(vex linear slides are the actual worst)
I changed it so it no longer offends you.
thanks. Just putting it out there.
Lol
they’re called scissor lifts bc they cut ur chances of winning.
SHOOK