It appalls me how little my team knows about the correct terminology of VEX parts. For example, when we were preparing for our school’s summer VEX camp, we were inventorying our parts, and the guy that made the checklist called the rack gears (276-1957) “green jagged pieces for linear slides [Linear motion kit].” Also, they usually don’t refer to the rotary gears by their tooth count (and High Strength or not), only using relative terms like “small”, “medium”, “large”, “thick”, etc. The reason why I’m posting this is because I wanna know if I’m not alone and if you guys do something about the problem, because I’m thinking about making a quiz for my team over parts terminology.
Honestly I don’t think terminology matters too much as long as you end up using the right part. Surely, it is nice to have a better name than “green jagged pieces”, but if you know how to use it, I do not think it really matters. For example I always refer to the 1x25 bars as straps, and a guy I knew called motor controllers “two-threes” (because they connect a two wire motor to a three wire cortex port 
)
Also, I always just refer to gears by their multiple of 12. Why say 60 tooth gear when you can just say 5 gear?
I have had the same experience. Getting the new members to know the jargon the veterans use is a big part of the early meetings. As Bryon points out, every team will has its own way of referring to the parts.
This year, one of my seniors is stepping up as the materials manager. To help him organize, and to help new members learn the names of parts, I put together a PDF of the majority of vex parts with their names and some pertinent data. We have it printed in a binder for students to learn from. I am hoping that the bins get sorted in such a way that we might add a location designation to each part.
These are printed from several illustrator files, totaling 86mb. If the source files are desired, I can post those in a few chunks.
:: edit – file replaced, look further down in this thread ::
As long as everyone knows a general idea of what each other is talking about, it generally works.
What is key is making sure you train the new members with the correct names to begin with.
@AppleDavidJeans I feel you. Some of the ones I remember: keps nuts used to be skirts & motor controllers were 2-to-3-wire converters
I wouldn’t implement a test, but encouraging good terminology is always good.
Guarenttee the two quickest waya they’ll learn the correct terms for things is by CADing their robots, and also if they’re shown how to make a proper build of materials and go through the process of ordering parts.
100% disagree. This is first and foremost an educational program and students shpuld be learing correct language for different kind of parts. Plus if you learn the correct terms, you can have much more coherent conversations with other teams who may not use the same lingo as you.
I think that’s a neat idea and easy way to see all of the vex parts in one place. Just a few little things I noticed top to bottom, these are generally the official or more common terms. Not to nitpick, just want to make sure that if you’re teaching new members there’s no info that they might be confused about later on.
Rack gear
I prefer referring to the standard gears as Torque gears, that way if you’re abbreviating or marking motors with HT, HS, or Turbo there’s no confusion
VexNet keys aren’t bluetooth, they operate on 2.4GHz frequency and are a VEX custom communication system
battery power expander
Motor controller 29, is often just called MC29
I 100% agree with @pwnageNick. If you grow up your whole life in a family (a team) that calls apples (parts) “bananas”, then you go to a friend’s house (worlds or other competitions) and ask them for a “banana”, and they give you a banana, that’s not really going to work out for you so well. If you ever need to communicate with someone outside of your team, I wish you luck asking for or talking about a c channel and some screws of a specific size by saying “one of those long structure poles that’s 2 holes wide and some screws that are like mediumly short”
Thanks for the input @Kevin Boenisch
I fixed the items you listed and a few others. Our team typically calls the standard gearing torque as well, but it is listed as “standard” on the vex site, so I left it that way. I also found a page on shaft items that was missing before.
vex-parts.pdf (903 KB)
You are my savior. Thank you!
No turntables? Love me some solid rotary motion devices.
Provided that the parts are named correctly in the parts library. 
We described the gears in terms of the pinion gear.
The pinion has 12 teeth. So it’s a ‘1’
The next largest gear is the 36 tooth gear which is 3 x 12 so it’s a ‘3’
The next largest gear is the 60 tooth gear which is 5 x 12 so it’s a ‘5’
And finally the 84 tooth gear is 7 x 12 so it’s a ‘7’
This naming scheme is useful because it basically describes the gear in terms of it’s ratio.
IE if I wanted a 3:5 ratio, I would need a 3 and a 5 gear. Makes sense.
Also the barlock v/s nutbar v/s pillow block v/s bearing flat items are classic ones that people don’t usually know the names of.
Very well done! If we have an enterprising person - they would make 2’x4’ banner size PDF that we could print at BannersOnTheCheap.com and hang in our robot labs… I hear VEX used to have a poster size of all parts but not any more.
Or remember to use I guess if you don’t know the names, you don’t know when and where to use them.
@DRow is on a roll with new media, maybe he could come up with one. I’d love to have a few with the new parts on it for fall for my new roboteer and mentor training classes.
Good Afternoon All,
I recently became part of the Space Cookies team in Mountain View, CA as a mentor. Like many of you, I was annoyed at the lack of common knowledge and verbiage when it came to the nomenclature of the parts. With some help from Doug Moyers, I’ve assembled a parts map/poster that is separated into groups much like the website categories.
The original file was 48" wide and 54" tall - but after learning that more common plotters can only print 42" wide, I downsized it to 42" wide - which is why the height on this is an odd 47.25" tall.
Anyway - we have put this into our parts room at our lab and it has been very helpful - and thus I wanted to share it with the rest of the VEX Community.
2016 VEX Parts (DropBox Link) (The file is 56MB - and thus too large to attach in the forum).
If anyone finds any issues with it - please let me know and I will compile the corrections and update as necessary.
Todd
@JustTodd Thanks for doing this, I send one off to the printer to see what it looks like.
I do this all the time too. I think its begun confusing my teammates, though, when I say, “lets put the 5 gear here and the 36 tooth here and the have that driven by a 7”
Thanks for sharing. This is great!!!
Perhaps @VEX Support can look into printing charts like these for VEX EDR. I’d be willing to pay a few $ for one. If you buy an VEXIQ kit, they come with nice laminated chart that has all the IQ parts listed.