Hey guys, I would really appreciate it if you could help us with a locking mechanism. I have a picture of our claw attatched to to the post. We have tried all of Infinity Minus 1’s locks, but could not get them to work.
Do you really need a lock? Can you load up your claw with enough rubber bands that it cannot return back up and devise some way to keep the claw up at the beginning of a match?
That would be helpful, but the problem is getting them to work with our current mount.
@mwang We can try that, we do use rubber bands, but I am assuming not enough to keep the claw up. Thanks!
We use about 10 rubber bands, which keeps the claw down easily. We could use 6 with the same effect but went a little overkill just in case they break in a match.
did you make your robot out of steel? If you have the chance, you should change to aluminum
I use an adaptation of 323Z’s Skyrise X-drive lock, shown here.
What I modified here was that I swapped out the standoffs for the HS shafts. I tried standoffs the first time around, but they couldn’t keep up with the stresses of the game and broke, so I swapped them out with HS shafts (4" kind). I had my dad carve out notches at work. I also replaced the shaft collar-standoff “receiver” part with another HS shaft sitting sideways so that it doesn’t rotate as much.
In the past, we had a locking mechanism that held our dumper out, it was basically just a catch made out of bar plate with some rubber bands to tension it. It works basically like one of those plastic snaps where once you push it in it won’t come out until you manually release it.
We’ve been using this locking mechanism and it’s never failed us:
@mwang17 We are using about 8 rubber bands, but how do we keep the claw up in inspection?
We have small hooks that hold it up. When the claw moves it unhooks itself and flips down.
@mwang17 Do you use #32 rubber bands or #64, cause we tried with 10 #64’s and it isn’t working too well, we also adjusted tension.
@wesleywong We would, but there is an incredible lack of aluminum in our school.
#64 rubber bands. Make sure there is an ample lever arm for the rubber bands to stretch over, or it won’t do very much.
@mwang17 Ok thanks, we tried it and it works now. Thanks for your help!