Hello. It is our first year in VEX and we are trying to make an assembly in which we are finding that we need to use many nylon spacers. We don’t necessarily like putting too many nylon spacers on our shafts, so is there any other alternative you use? Thanks.
Say you have 5 spacers holding the spacing for you. You could also just put a shaft collar on either end, and it will accomplish the same goal. This will often be heavier and have more friction, though. Overall, having a lot of spacers on an axle is far from the worst thing a new team could do. I would even say it’s not even really a problem.
You can use shaft collars to keep everything in place, one on each side of the gear.
As both @Aponthis and @Sebastian Melendez have said, you can use shaft collars. But it isn’t a better solution, or a cheaper one, just a different one.
Stacks of spacers work fine; is there some reason you don’t like doing it?
Thanks for your replies. @kypyro We usually don’t like using stacks of nylon spacers as it can make the shaft assembly quite unstable, as all the play in the spacers would multiply. Using collars sounds like a very smart idea.
Having some play on axles (as in, things moving a little bit from side to side) is really not a problem. As long as all gears still have a wide surface to mesh, they don’t need to line up perfectly. The bigger issue is friction if everything is too tight. I always make sure my spacers can spin freely, otherwise they are too tight together.