It looks like Nothing but Net is super hard on parts. I’ve been involved with the loc-tite and lubrication threads.
In the past I’ve tried to push design / build skills that make robots maintainable, the ability to get to key parts and make sure they are still bolted together / tight. I’ve even build some weird shaped tools to get into strange locations. (Why yes you can use the Universal Joints to build a “flexi” hex wrench).
And while I get that 2600 RPM flywheels stress the robot, but teams that are building these are you thinking about how to repair them and keep them working?
Likewise are teams looking at ways to reduce friction to not need lubrication or are you just looking for that slight extra edge?
As for easy reparability, we have designed our robot with “motor plates”. These motor plates are used so that you can take the motors off a complex gear assembly with only two screws and without touching the gears at all. We have also employed, for this year, a way to easily access our flywheel’s axle for easy and quick maintenance. We are also picking out bearings and drilling them, along with making all the holes in the metal are nicely drilled. Otherwise we use lubrication on all our flywheel components.
Flywheels tend to require a lot of maintenance, as issues seem to just crop up over time. We designed our flywheels so that the motors/gearboxes are exposed and easily accessible. This makes it very easy to make adjustments on the fly (wheel) to reduce friction and the like without disassembling the entire robot.
I had my robot from november up until the day before yesterday, and it was a modular flywheel. I could take off the motors or change the external ratio without touching the other. Sadly, after that many months it was too much and performance started to drop heavily, and we couldn’t match the fire rate some were getting even with 6 motors. A quick rebuild of the gearboxes over the past two days has proved that it was just vex parts degrading over time. We got new gears, cleaned some old ones with a dremel, replaced bent axles, added a ratchet and now both gearboxes are able to spin up with relative ease on two motors each, to be later joined in the center by a massive flywheel. I would say vex parts are good for a few months even with decent build quality, but over a long time stuff under stress needs to be replaced or rebuilt just because of how things wear down.