The scissor lift extends vertically to lift and stack Skystones. The Sparks wanted a design that was both lightweight and sturdy. The team used a scissor lift in a previous season and decided to take inspiration from their old design.

 

Materials

In this design, the scissor lift was made of aluminum bars. The team wanted to use their new Carvey milling machine to carve the pieces of the scissor lift. The team considered Delrin, HDPE, and Expanded PVC. The Delrin and HDPE proved to be too dense. Originally, the team decided to use PVC because of its lightness and durability. The PVC, however, was too flexible. For the final design, the Sparks decided to use HDPE, however, alterations were necessary to reduce weight. The team discovered that the HDPE was fairly unstable when the scissor lift extended to its full height. To fix this problem, the team added a piece of aluminum to each pair of bars. There are five on each side of the scissor lift.

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Towards the end of the season, the team decided to change the bottom set of "x"s to soley metal pieces. The bottommost HDPE pieces became bent due to the constant weight of the rest of the lift and the arm and gripper mechanism. The pieces being bent caused the lift to come up crooked and inconsistently and the lift was visibly struggling to extend. The team decided that replacing these bent pieces with aluminum pieces would make the bottom of the lift much stronger than before and the rigidness would make the lift come up straighter. Two of the ⅛” aluminum bar pieces equal ¼” of the original HDPE pieces. Since the outermost piece of each cross had a metal bar on top of the HDPE they needed three ⅛” pieces of the aluminum for the outer cross to be the same thickness of the HDPE pieces. The inner pieces will have two ⅛” pieces to match the thickness of the HDPE pieces for a total of five aluminum pieces on each side at the bottom.
 

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Dimensions

The side of the scissor lift is made up of ten bars arranged in a lattice pattern. Each bar of the scissor lift is 10" by 1" rectangle. When closed, the scissor lift is less than 10" tall to ensure that it fits under the alliance bridge. When extended, however, the scissor lift can reach a height of one meter. 

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Channel Pieces

At the top of the scissor lift is a channel piece made using Carvey milling machine. This piece keeps the scissor lift stable as it moves. To learn more about the CAD behind the scissor lift, click here.