I was mounting an ultrasonic sensor in the robot I’m slowly building for tutorial purposes today. Rather than just cut a piece of Aluminum or make a bracket, I was looking for a simple way of doing this and ended up with the following.
Half inch standoff, shaft collar with set screw removed, three 8-32 screws and two washers.
Now I remember that Jordan (I think) had an interesting way of joining two shafts using lock bars, standoffs and collars. What other interesting and unconventional ways of using VEX parts in a not so obvious way has anyone come up with?
If you need to couple two axles and need them to be pretty sturdy, you can put both into a pinion or one of the shaft couplers with a collar and a lock bar on either side and standoffs connecting the two lock bars. This is how we couple the axles on our roller, we tried 24C’s method of omitting the pinion but since the joint was in the middle of our roller, we went back. It is very sturdy.
Our axle coupler is simply two 3-hole pieces of bar connected at the ends with 1" standoffs. Inside is one of those little coupler things from the 2 wire motors surrounded by 2 shaft collars to keep the axles from moving away from eachother.
The shaft collars are also pretty good for making tension supports from standoffs to stabilize your tower and have adjustable tension. Just make sure to use a little threadlocker to keep it adjusted right.
A few of our teams have used the standoff to collar method quite frequently as a triangular support. It really is a great way of getting just the right angle and not using much weight or space like a full bar would.
we used collar nuts to secure a top claw, it was metal plates screwed into the collar nuts connected to an axle so the top claw was connected to the axle. really good way of doing it
