Did more cad, especially working on the gear shifter mechanism. I was having lapse and hackatime issues so I couldn’t really record much or post a devlog. Here’s what I worked on and some problems I ran into:

• chromebooks are slow as hell and are literally impossible to cad on (hence i need the macbook). This means the only time I can cad really productivley is at home which is annoying because I don’t do anything at school.
• For the gearshifter to work, it needs to be geared 1:1 with the tubes. This is a huge problem geometrically because it hits the blue piece. In fact, it goes into the bearing hole for the blue piece which means I can’t just cope and be lazy by making the piece thin. The closer I move the output gears to the dog clutch gears, the closer the blue piece moves to the center gear which cancels out making the 1:1 gears smaller. I have to figure out a solution soon.
• I swtched from the cam being sandwiched between bearings to the bearings being sandwiched between the cam because it gives space for the gears to be on the outisde. I’m pretty sure this is also better force wise because instead of pulling out each bearings individually when it moves side to side, the bearings are in contact so you effectively have to pull out both bearings at the same time. Also the lever arm for the center version looks smaller than the version with the separate gear just for the shifting which means less friction.
• I had to tweak the ratios and spacing a bit because the blue piece barely has space. Even now, it’s way too thin (1mm) which I don’t like.

No, I haven’t forgotten the mythical one-way-bearing based concept, I’m still thinking about it. I have a vague idea of what it should kind of look like (somehow have two sets, both of them mirrored, each of them ratcheting the other way). I’m pretty sure there’s a solution but I’m not smart enough to figure it out.