How strong is low strength chain?
Why don’t teams like using ls chain on there base?
How does low strength chain break in vex?
My team has a chain base, but we were worried that the low strength chain was to weak. This made us decide to go with the high strength chain on our base. AFter building our gateway robot we decided to reduce the width of our drive train because each side takes up 4 inches. Also we can’t fit our manipulator in the middle.
Yesterday we disassembled our base of our robot, and made it smaller. To do so we used the low strength chain. When we finished building it yesterday we tested it, and it worked really well. After we tested if the chain can handle a lot of weight. To so we put on 13 pounds of weight on our base, and drove it around. Surprisingly it never broke, and is still fast. (2- 269 motors and 2-3 wire motors geared at 5:3)
More information about our base is that first the 2 motors are chained together. After we have a gear ratio of 5:3 which gives us our speed. The 60 tooth gear is attached to a motor and the 36 tooth is attached to a wheel. Then we chain that wheel to the front wheel, so all of our wheels are powered. Finally the front wheel is also chained to an encoder. If any of these chains break then the following problems will occure:
Front wheel is not powered
Encoder is not powered
1 motor is powering one side of the base.
What do you guys think? 13 pounds never broke any low strength chain off of our robot?
What do you think about this drive train.
Why do people give low strength chain a bad name even though it is quite strong?
If you use a small sprocket with the low strength chain, in a high torque-load/shock-load situation, the chain carries a high-tensile load and snaps. If you use a larger sprocket in this same application, the tensile load is reduced, and the chain typically holds out.
Though the “low strength” chain is designed for smaller loads, I’ve had great success using it with larger diameter sprockets.
In 2009, four Exothermic robots had drive trains geared up at 1:3 using spur gears, with power transmitted at 1:1 via small chains to 2.75" wheels. In five tournaments each, including World Championships, one robot lost one chain from one of four wheels one time. The setup was very reliable, and you can ask some old timers how fast and maneuverable those robots were.
I’m a big fan of small chain used in situations where the chain is not dead-lifting large loads and where there is not much shock force (sudden jerks) on the chain.
The small chain has some important advantages of the large chain in the right situation: it’s easier to manage chain tension, the sprockets are narrower, and it’s just generally easier to work with.
No one said that “low strength” chain always breaks. Its tipically good a base that is light weight, or relativly light. Also try to aviod using the 12 tooth “low strength” chain. I think the reason a lot of teams do not use this old chain is because some teams have had bad experiences using it. Best of luck to you and your team in this upcoming gateway season.
Thanks for you reply, and good luck in gateway also. Hopefully we can meet up at worlds this year. I didn’t say low strength chain always break? I had this post because I want to see the insight about low strength chain. I have been using the vex forum for the past 3 years, and I notice teams talking about low strength chain. Either on there base, or how they hate that low strength chain is too weak.
ok, hopefully ill see you at worlds, and i got your team number memorized, 2443Z. Low strength chain can be good in some situations, i just think a lot of team don’t like because it is up against something called “high strength” chain.
We used low-strength chain in this bot: https://vexforum.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=4840&c=. Initially, we liked it, because we could easily modify the gear ratio. However, the chain was vunerable to hits on the side by other robots (including our alliance partners), and installing protective strips didn’t totally solve the problem. Eventually, we went back to gearing on the driving base.
not entirely true, most people I know hated “low strength” chain long before high strength came out. basically, if you know how to use it it is amazing, if you don’t, it will be the downfall of your robot. if it is perfectly tensioned, you can even use it with small sprockets in a drivetrain, and I’ve seen it used very successfully in a dead-lift application (roundup forklift mechanism) vex chain is a great way to transmit power, just try to use it’s high efficiency by running it at high speed, low torque, and always keep it WELL TENSIONED.
My team (254A) has had a lot of success with LS chain drives and we’ve found that in many ways LS chain drives actually work better than HS chain drives. For more details, I would like to refer you all to the Chain Drive thread https://vexforum.com/t/chain-drive/19192/1.
