I did tons of brainstorming and came up with a better replacement for the meshing/unmeshing gears (I actually had 2.5 hours more recorded the night before but lapse ran into a problem so they aren’t counted for here). I realized I could keep the gears in contact the entire time, and instead use a perpendicular CAM (idk what it’s called, it’s basically a CAM that has its offsets parallel to its axis of rotation) to engage a dog clutch onto the gears. The dog clutch basically has 0 chance of bad alignment because the clutch will self align. This hopefully makes everything much more reliable and efficient. To power this, I need a third gear directly connected to the input gear that takes the linear CAM below the input shaft (you can’t run it coaxially). To make it fit, I changed up some of the gear ratios. I soon plan to switch from 1.25 mm to 1mm modulus.