Low Friction Material

My team is using plastic brackets to hold a stack of cubes in place on our reverse stacker, and we want the cubes to be able to slide smoothly down/up the inside of the brackets. What I thought might be a good idea was some kind of felt or fabric to facilitate sliding, but those don’t seem to be legal.

For TP, I saw a lot of teams wrap some kind of meshy cloth that looks like cheese cloth around their intakes, and I wasn’t sure if that was that year only, or if I just missed something in the rules.

It’s a legal part - anti-slip mat.
Link: Anti-Slip Mat (2-types) - VEX Robotics

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They want cubes to slip

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yeah, are there extra-slip mats?

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yes, the anti-slip mat has a high friction. for what you are looking for, polycarbonate aka lexan may be good, but you can also use any of the other legal non shattering plastics.

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You could use also just use free rolling wheels.

Have you considered a zip-tie weave?

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Lol - true… but the item they were referring to was almost definitely anti-slip mat.

To clarify - that wasn’t a “that year only” item being allowed, it was a legal thing from the Vex products line-up.

Felt or slippery fabric would be reasonable for slipping of cubes, but is NOT allowed (as it is not a legal Vex product or a specifically allowed item). As mentioned above, some alternatives might be the polycarbonate, rolling wheels, or some zip tie work.

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Some coupled stand-offs would be good, so would be the backside of some C-channel (steel>aluminum), and lexan, but attaching the lexan while keeping it smooth might be a challenge.

you could put free-spinning spacers to roll it around with super low friction, but I sense you don’t need the friction to be that low. I’d just use polycarb, but tbh plastic on metal doesn’t have too much friction.

My issue is that the brackets are really thin (.625") so I don’t think that the cubes would really slide all the well

1/16 acetal (delrin)

why do you need them to slide that well?

You could try Adhesive Foam https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexedr/products/accessories/other/275-1254.html
or you could also try Polycarbonate https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexedr/products/accessories/other/polycarbonate.html

If you’re looking for plastics - you can use something like Delrin or PTFE which has a pretty low coefficient of friction - use countersunk screws and take some extra care when drilling out mounting holes and you could probably get a pretty smooth outer surface. Normal plastics such as polycarb will do fine as well - I don’t think you need anything that low friction. Just make sure that you take some fine grit sandpaper to all the edges when you’re done, and it’ll be nice and smooth.

That meshy cloth will increase the grip given - the opposite of what you may want to achieve.

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