New Bearing Block
hopelm
Entry ID #: 5498
Created: Wed, Jan 10, 2018 12:06 PM
While designing our robot for this year’s competition our team ran into various issues that we set out to solve through this challenge. Time spent on the Vex Forum also confirmed this is an issue among several teams. Our design focuses primarily on bearing blocks. While designing a claw for our robot the space was limited and required a long gear train using the smallest gears. Because the gear train was longer than 3 holes we weren’t able to use bearing blocks to help stabilize the axles. The inefficiency created through the destabilized axels prevented us from using this design and we have since had to find a different solutions. Our new part is a bearing block that is 20 holes long and is designed to allow the user to break off however long a bearing block is required. There is another aspect of our robot that requires a long gear train, bearing blocks have been added but it took a really long time to find the proper spacing and gear sizes as to allow each axle to go through a bearing block. Having this part would not only allow more versatility with gear trains, but could also save significant amounts of time. This part was designed using 3D modeling software, Autodesk Inventor 2018. This design was modeled primarily after the Nut Bar that has since been discontinued. From this challenge we were able to take the design process and apply it more directly to our robot than we already normally do. Since we first started this challenge we have since discussed more and more parts that can be redesigned and created to allow more efficient development of competition robots. The different state of mind this challenge has helped to develop can be directly applicable to our future careers. It has helped to teach us how to rethink problems we may run into and approach it from a different view to create a solution.
