Oh yeah, and you definitely aren’t alone.
Let me prove it to y’all.
First off, let’s talk about these new ̶b̶e̶v̶e̶l̶ … ̶s̶p̶u̶r̶…err… hybrid gears. They aren’t quite spur gears, and they aren’t quite bevel gears. These are some sort of frankenstein between the two. Frankenstein wasn’t perfect, so let’s address the elephant in the room first. They are 3/4" of a pitch wide. So they won’t like being stuck between two beams that are one beam thickness apart. Gotta give these gears a little extra room to breathe. There are hybrid gears in the new IQ gen2 kits, so make sure you pay close attention to the clearance around hybrid gears if you are lucky enough to have one of those kits already.
But! With that one downside, they have some amazing They mesh perfectly with all the existing VEX IQ spur gears. All the blue gears in this are the new hybrid gears, while the yellow one in the middle is a normal 36t spur gear.
Now, when I said these are like bevel gears, I wasn’t telling the whole truth. These gears aren’t like normal bevel gears. Normally if you need two sized bevel gears, they are made in pairs to ensure that they mesh together perfectly. These gears aren’t like that. Check out the comparison to the original bevel gears in purple. You are no longer limited to a 1:1 90° mesh. These gears don’t care! In my example assembly, I have a 24t hybrid gear driving both a 12t and a 36t hybrid gear. (I’ll give bonus points to anyone that can tell, or show, me another way we can take advantage of this feature.)
Little bit of a disclaimer here, if you also have a VEX GO kit, be careful. It also has it’s own hybrid gears, but they do not have the same diametral pitch and therefor are not compatible with each other.
I’m excited to how teams take advantage of the new opportunities presented to them with these new parts!