I have a single flywheel like 8059a and i want to know if a ratchet mechanism is possible on it. Does a ratchet make your flywheel shoot faster? How would I make it?
I would get other opinions, and I havent tried it, but from what I hear it does not really help out that much. It would definitely not make it shoot faster as far as I know. Good luck!
if you want a ratchet, here’s the one we use, we find it helpful, but not everyone agrees
It can be helpful for single flywheels at high rpm from what i have seen, but i have not seen many double flywheel designs use it. It will not make your launcher launch more rapidly, however it may help your flywheel keep momentum after you turn off the motors so you can turn on the motors again and the flywheel will already be spinning to start out. The main benefit I can see from using a ratchet is keeping your motors from breaking but i think this is only necessary for the very high rpm launchers. My team does not use the ratchet mechanism because our flywheel does not spin at a very high rpm and we like being able to slow it down quicker to be able to transition from high power shots to close up shots. It really depends on your design and strategy if it will be beneficial or not.
We use the same ratchet that 1727B ( @Collin Stiers ) uses. We have found it to be useful on our robot, mainly because we have a high RPM. And the way it allows the flywheel to keep spinning when we turn off the motors is sometimes useful for the reasons that @RLA111 stated. If you want it to slow down faster, then you can simply tighten the pawls, which will increase grabbing power.
There are some risks included with some ratchets though. As 84 tooth high strength gears sometimes over mesh with 12 tooth low strength (or high strength) gears, Causing extra friction. We had to file our 12 tooth gear down and it was awful. Although it does work nicely now. 
Also they tend to take up lots of space.
Today I managed to also build a ratchet on a 60-tooth, using one of the old helical gears as the ratchet gear. It is basically a scaled-down version of the 84-tooth, using the stock pawl instead of the cut pillow blocks. Then zip ties are used for springs 
To be honest with a flywheel as long as you don’t ever let your motors spin the wrong way (through programming) you won’t need a ratchet device.
the reason we have a ratchet is to lower motor strain by essentially disengaging the motors from the flywheel
At the high gear ratios the speed reduction from flywheel to motor is such that even given that torque increase it would barely turn the motor.
This design works really nicely. Our team has recently used this design and It has drastically improved our flywheel design. The people who came up with this design have helped more people than they can imagine. I would definitely recommend it. 
Why thank you I will post the 60-tooth version soon, probably next week because one of our other teams is using it.
Looking forward to seeing it!
It uses one of the old helical gears as a ratchet gear and zip ties as springs instead of rubber links.