Link postion repost

didnt get much response when i posted on saftey area so thought id try here

is this postiton for a link allowed?

the red area

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27316623@N06/3202741853/http://www.flickr.com/photos/27316623@N06/3202741853/

cheers

hi,
might be ok, but if it were me i would have it somewhere near the back of the robot away from the weapon.

i would agree with calum.

you always want your link as far from a weapon as possible. it might be ok with some event organisers but its borderline at best in my opinion

As a tech checker I would accept that position as long as the link was angled away from the arm. so say at 45-60degrees from the base of the robot, this way your hand is less likely to be caught up in the arm coming down.

As long as the tech checker can see that your hand isnt going to get involved in the weapon it will be ok, and that it is easy to insert and remove the link, i.e. you dont have to put you head in a dangerous position to see to put the link in.

But as others have said the further away the better. This is only my opinion other tech checkers may have a different one. Also it is hard to get an exact scale from the photo. Hope this helps Alex.

As a tech checker I agree with Ed. Its not ideal, but acceptable if you make the proper precautions.

Can I just pop a question in here while were on the subject of safety etc? Would like to get the viewpoints of tech-checkers (and arena marshalls perhaps)

Kaizers lifting forks are being controlled by an Electronize 2-way switcher with the built-in failsafe being set to switch both relays off in the event of a lack of signal. I assumed this was going to be fine for safety purposes (lack of signal resulting in no movement etc). But I read something on the Australian forum that made me reconsider the situation.

Should the unit go into failsafe, would the forks have to return to whatever position they need to be in for the locking pin to fit? The 2-way switcher can be set so that one relay stays on in failsafe. I could connect it up so that that relay would control the returning motion of the actuator to lower the forks and stop them at the angle required for the locking pin to fit in. The only problem with this is that the actuator has no built in limit switches so it would continue pulling the forks in past the lowest point they should go and would result in the mechanism wrecking itself.

As a tech-checker or arena marshall would you

a) be happy to have the forks stop at any point during failsafe and have the locking pin fitted once the robot is back in the pits and the forks have been moved to their required position or

b) would you like to see the forks return to the lowered position in the event of failsafing so that the locking pin can be fitted if a valid signal still isnt being received at the end of a battle.

I can fit an external micro-switch into the robot if the general consensus is for option b. I thought it would be best to check now and get one fitted while theres still ample time.

Thanks in advance

My take is as follows:

If the robot should failsafe the forks should stop moving, so your setup would be fine.

If you were disarming the robot then you would need to fit the locking pin before removing the robot from the arena. It should be possible to move the forks to do this at the end of the fight. If that were not possible then you would likely have sufficient damage that you could not fit the locking pin anyway.

I would also recommend fitting limit switches as it is very difficult to limit the movement in a battle.

Thanks Kane.

The limit switches are usually one of those fiddly little jobs that you forget about until the last minute and then end up taking longer than planned to implement!

If I get time, Ill sort out travel limitation - for the moment though the forks go down past the horizontal so as soon as I see the front end lifting up thats when I cut the power, and at the other end of travel, the linking mechanism Ive got is such that if the actuator goes past a certain point, the forks stop going up and actually start going down a little on the same stroke.

But I agree that limit switches could be handy :)

Yep Kane is right, if damage causes something to go wrong you want to kill it dead straight away then worry about locking devices after. Not always the case, but a for a lifter I would say it was, Flippers and axes are slightly different.