Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Psh, 604 needs to bring these babies back.:cool:

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

There's really no point to making a two piece wheel without having the undercut groove to capture the tread. It won't be any different than a one piece wheel without it.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Yeah i know ive added it since i just forgot to do it when i took that picture. Thanks Cory

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Someone explain to me why, in this day and age, anyone would bother making custom wheels. :confused:

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Because they're cool! Although I have to say AM Performance wheels are really good, especially their price. You could get custom wheels about 40% lighter though. If that matters.

http://www.andymark.biz/am-0393.html

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Ya, we made them this year for weight reasons. Also, Andy Mark 4" performance wheels do not come with the bolt pattern, making direct drive wheels much harder to set up.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Because we would have spent $1800+shipping to buy AndyMark Performance Wheels this year...and once we got them we would have had to do secondary machining on them anyways.

Instead we made our own for $300 plus ~20 hours of my time.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

How many wheels did you make for yourselves and other teams? Im just curious.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Martin,

Cory is definitely right, we spent about $1500 plus shipping for a set of wheels for our bot, practice and rookie team.

They also weighed in at 1lb per wheel for a 6 inch wheel. Even with modd'd IFI wheels they were way tooo heavy.

For next season we will be making custom wheels unless "standard" wheels (2009) make a return.

-RC

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

We made a total of 72 wheels.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Hey Cory,

I totally understand and agree with what you're saying, but I'm curious as to how much design time the wheels took. Is that included in that 20 hours? Design time was a huge limiting factor for my team this year, and it was probably the number one reason we used off-the-shelf wheels.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Wheels are really not that demanding in terms of "design time". A good wheel can be pumped through CAD, verified with FEA, re-CAD-ed and ready for manufacturing in a couple hours.

-Brando

P.S.- Obviously this could vary depending on the wheels you actually design. I'm just speaking from experience in terms of the wheels I've designed in the past.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

The design of our wheels was based off of previous wheels we have made, although it is the first one-piece 4" wheel. It probably took 20-30 minutes to design the wheel.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Jamie,

The Poofs/RAWC also have years of experience perfecting and optimizing their wheel designs year after year. Their standardized drivetrain which is then adapted to the game on a yearly basis is something that always gives them an edge in both manufacturing time and during the robot design process (much the same as Team 25). If you check out their older wheels you can see a pretty cool "evolution in design" process.

.

Re: pic: 4 Inch Wheel Design
 

Our traction wheels came in the 2008 kit. So we didn't spend any money on them (besides registration), and they took 0 hours to make.

The kit wheels are highly under-rated.

I see custom wheels as more of a fashion statement then a practicality. They certainly are impressive and cool :cool: Props for making awesome things.