Finishing Event Horizon V3.2 Part 1: Design

I have finally un-killed myself from the FRC season.

My first priority on Event Horizon is to fix the misalignment issue I saw after spinning up the new drum for the first time. It seems that I will need to make a solid connection from the idler shaft to the motor shaft in order to make a continuous solid body.  My first idea was to make a 3/8" aluminum shaft that presses onto the motor shaft. I bought a reamer for this purpose and re-designed the drum internals slightly.

New idler shaft

Then, I looked over the last revision of the design, and found a bunch of things that I was not particularly happy with and re-designed them. I was going to need to re-make the side pieces to accommodate the new idler shaft design on the drum, so it seemed reasonable to make more changes. The first of these was the serpentine belt run. I mostly used the belt run to reduce space and weight while still maintaining high traction wheels. After thinking about my design more, I concluded that I did not actually care about traction. If I ever get into a pushing match, I am probably going to lose that match anyway. As such, I got rid of the BaneBots wheels and replaced them with pulleys, which do not use serpentine belt runs and make everything thinner.

New wheels and bottom view of armor modifications

I then decided that the way I had mounted the front braces might result in stress concentrations near the weapon bearing mounts. I switched the mounting to pins, which resulted in interference between the pins and mounting screws. Thus, I offset the side plates and rounded the front corners of the braces. This is actually beneficial for a few reasons: 1) It makes it less likely that an undercutter blade will catch the edge of the armor plate 2) It lets me switch from plastite screws, which tend to strip out, to bolts.

Pinned front joint

Inside of the finished front block design

Outside of the finished front block design

It looks like I pretty much redesigned everything... I guess I have some machining to do.

CAD Model