hole? If you apply a uniform distributed load to the surface of a round dart and it elastically deforms under that load, it doesn't squash flat, it stays round. Seems obvious, doesn't it?
Here's a quick assembled cage render of another iteration of Hy-Con with suboptimal envelopment using some low-res meshes. You can see that generating circle appear out of the woodwork, broken only by the chamfers on the edges of the wheels to guide in darts and prevent the rims from being a pinchpoint.
This is another 9.0mm iteration BTW. I decided to initially back-off to 9.5mm root-to-root and corresponding 9.5mm groove radius in the real world prototype. We'll see what that does on the chrono and go from there. It has way more envelopment than anything that has ever existed before.
And this is the 3D printable, minimalist prototype cage and printable wheels (very distinct from the version that would be machined, other than the profile).
Meant for no blaster - its purpose is to verify that I am not an idiot, and that the geometry works, feeds, doesn't jam horribly, shoot sideways, reduce darts to a cloud of nanoparticles, generate a black hole, or anything else undesired. Then I will get to designing this into something bigger. Oh, do I have plans for this little number once it is nailed down and working.
So enough theorizing and renders, here are the very first parts I received today. Printed by dkdavid721. PLA since this won't see service. It is split down the center of the bore to avoid printing overhangs. Pieces will be Devconned together.
Note I have long been averse to printing in nerf and I am finally starting to turn around on that with recent demonstrations of its viability. Some combination of realizations about design for it, and improvement of the technology.
41.5mm root, 50mm OD, 9.5mm groove radius, 14mm thickness.
Comparison of OD to Hasbro HIR flywheel, and a SSS flywheel (Artifact V1 fullprofile serrated). These are big.
Okay, someone's gonna comment on that. Why is this a large format cage? Well, I am done with SSS format cages. It isn't about the limitations of the envelope so much as the limitations of the crappy, flexy stock blaster parts they get bolted to, so my intent for this is not to ever install "into" a stock blaster (though perhaps some version of it could be appended to a piece of stock blaster to replace the whole shell/cage mess up front). Secondarily, lower rotation speed and NVH, which once freed from the stock envelope is a gimme. And third was a simple matter of motors. This uses outrunners. Without that, I could not get prototype wheels printed without them self-destructing. Also, I am moving to outrunners in general. Better packaging, no shaft mounting. The speed capabilities of available, favorable motors dictate large wheels to have enough surface speed to support dynamic friction at useful velocity. So that's the way it's being done.
Prototype cage from feed end. Notable features here: 14mm bore, and low-angle feed ramp with 19mm entry diameter.
The 14mm bore is a sort of self-evident direction for cage design when dealing with high envelopments. The entering dart must be constrained to the correct position to avoid the flywheel rim pinchpoints. I have also had more messy or initially yawing Artifact Red (15mm bore on Gen2 and later) shots in combat than I like that seem to be related to rim pinch. Better round control is better, and it just seems like a good starting point. It isn't as tight as a classic DrSnikkas style tightbore and shouldn't do the negative things a tightbore does, but makes flywheel design a LOT less compromised.
The low angle feedramp; well, I don't know why Artifact and many other cages have such steep, sharp ramps that appear to have been made with an 82 degree countersink cutter. Is it really that big a deal to cut a nice gentle ramp when it's already on a CNC mill? I guess a bit more cycle time than the countersink cutter.
Flywheel cavities on the protocage are closed on the outboard end for printability of that outside bore half piece, this is possible since the fly