It’s Kieran from Team 3116A, The United Kingdom. I am writing this reveal because I have come up with a new lift design, one that can be used in this season. I have decided to call my new design, ‘The Gearbar’ because of its similarities to a Chainbar and a 4 bar, however quite obviously, it uses gears!
The Gearbar works by having 2 pieces of metal which are fixed to gears of any sizes, and then having an odd amount of gears between them, this is how you can make ratios with it. On one fixed Gear you will have your intake, (A) and your other, a tower or end of a lift (B). They allow for internal stacking due to their motion and that is what we use them for. By powering the middle Gear(s) (C) the bar pivots around gear B in a circular motion. My team has a competition today so we will add some videos of how it is tonight (Roughly 12 hours). Here are some pictures…
Any contribution the VEX community could give would greatly help the development of this design.
Well they said they would upload a video after their comp. Although this does appear to be an interesting concept. I can’t wait to see how it will work.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but it appears to me that they have just replaced the sprockets and chain in a chainbar with gears. The bottom gear is stationary, and that results in the last gear being stationary. It is just a chainbar that was made in a different way.
I would also be concerned with the slop in the gears adding up if you made this much longer.
A couple of AZ teams (2114B and 2114Z for sure, as far as I can remember) used a “gear bar” for their mobile goal intakes at our tournament last weekend.
Hey guys! I would just like to go through a few things, I will film a video today of it moving and doing what its meant to as the videos taken at the competition were not a nice quality and i couldnt use it as much as i wanted due to my schedule. Yes, this is meant to be just like a 4 bar or a chainbar but with gears. I know that this might not be the greatest design right now as it is still in its prototype stages, that is why i asked for any contribution you could give. Hopefully you will all understand the motion after the video. Thanks
In the spirit of wanting to contribute rather than just knock a great idea, I think this is totally workable. There are a couple of things I would suggest, though. I would replace the gears at the end with sprockets and replace the gears in the middle with chain. You can accomplish the uneven movement you want by using different sized sprockets on the ends or keep the orientation the same by using same size sprockets. You could come up with a clever name for it like chain bar. I think with those minor modifications, you will be on to something. Good luck and keep innovating.
I’ll throw in that i am very happy to see this, and nothing would make me happier than to see something like this win at worlds over a chain bar or DR4B. I hope you keep trying new ideas. It gets boring if all you ever do is go with what everyone has proven works.
As far as 4 bar vs chain bar vs gear bar, i would be interested to see actual theoretical and experiment based comparisons of weight, friction, part cost, space efficiency, and long term reliability. Every design has its own pros and cons. There is no miracle mechanism that is better than all others in every way.
I don’t think we’ve seen any videos of the system, but it’s very straightforward to imagine, particularly if you have experience with a chainbar.
Imagine the two sprockets at either end of the chainbar are replaced with gears. As I’m sure you’re aware, the sprockets are the same size. So to are the gears you put in place of the sprockets.
Now, instead of using a chain to synchronize the rotation of the two end sprockets, use a gear train* to do the same thing to the end gears. That’s it.
*One special rule when using gears for this: the number of gears between the two end gears has to be odd. That is so the two end gears will be rotating in the same direction.
