Are you sure it is 35 degrees? Did you CAD your design to ensure this? I’m asking this because that angle is really close to horizontal in comparison to other trays that do higher stacks. If it was 35 degrees, you should actually have an easier time moving those cubes up the tray since more of the force of gravity is countered by the angled normal force of the tray. This also means there would be slightly less friction between the cubes and the tray. If your tray does rest at 35 degrees then you likely have a mechanical issue with the intake.
Do you have rubber treads between fins? It helped compression a bunch when my team switched out chain for rubberized tread.
At 0:36 of this video, you can see that this robot has about an 8 cube capacity while also having a resting tray angle greater than 45 degrees (just eyeballing it, but it is pretty clear). Maybe this gives you a better perspective of how to improve your tray intake.
I’m pretty sure we’ve got all of these suggestions already completed thanks for the suggestions regardless. I assume at this point that it’s either due to joint bending or metal being bent.
Our tray was roughly 50 degrees to prevent the tray from smacking into towers when moving around. IMO its a good trade-off as tuning an intake to have better compression is fairly easy to move a cubes up a higher degree slope.
You could do this or you can code have two different resting states. One for 45 degrees and one for 50 degrees or any degree value of driver’s preference while optimizing intaking.