Turbo gears - real-world uses?

What are some applications that Forum-ites out there have used turbo gears for in the 393 motors? I got “flywheel” checked off already, but I can’t think of any other real-world competition uses for turbo gears since the torque is so low. I’d love to hear whether people have put these to good use, or if they’re just a novelty, used solely for flywheels. Thanks!

We used turbo for our drivetrain in the last worlds.

In nbn, most drives we’re turbo, as were most intakes. A good number of drives in starstruck were also turbo.

15:1 turbo lift ratio for speed between 7:1 speed and 7:1 torque

Keep in mind that in starstruck, a lot of people either used 6 motors or the 3.25 wheels for the base so the torque might be minimal but it’s enough to move the whole robot at an incredible speed.

Robots with DR4B’s will be heavier though

The main uses for turbo gears are either for fast drive trains without using any external gearing, and tweaking gear ratios (turbo 7:1 for a ratio around 2.92:1 is a good alternative to torque 3:1 if you want a little bit more speed).

Thats what 136S used on their Starstruck lift. Using a 36 tooth gear was too risky with all the torque on the arm so we used the 84 tooth gear for the surface area to secure onto the metal arm.

Our standard drive nowadays is turbos with 3.25" wheels and 4 motors. Every motor on our NbN robot was turbo.

We tried 1:3 with torque motors, and it worked, but the 36 tooth gears lost teeth like crazy. Each gear lost three teeth by the end of the season.

In Skyrise, my team used 4 turbo motors with a 1:7 gear ratio on a DR4B, and we could lift 3 cubes with no problems. In NbN and Starstruck, we used turbo motors on our drive.

Edit: I think we used about 6-8 of the thick rubber bands.

Did you use lots of rubber bands?

I dunno about the other guys, but my team quite literally called our robot “Rubber” for the season. We used a total of 40 rubber bands throughout the robot.

XD i know a team that had 80 on their lift :stuck_out_tongue: LOL

Turbos work well if there is minimal friction. It makes a big difference!

This season we didn’t want to risk burning out, so we went with 15:12 (gray sprocket to green sprocket) with a HS motor on 4’’ wheels.
– (1.6*15):12, works out to be a 2:1 ratio.

Turbo 3.25" wheels are pretty common too.

I know a team that had 300 on their lift :slight_smile:

Wow – thanks to everyone for all of the feedback. This is incredibly helpful!

Personally, this year im using turbo gears in my rd4b 1:5

@9065_parker Wow that would be really fast. How light is your dr4b going to be because 1:5 turbo is almost the same as 1:2 strength?

@9065_parker How many turbo motors are you using, 2 or 4?