View Single Post
  #22   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 21-01-2016, 13:58
FoleyEngineer's Avatar
FoleyEngineer FoleyEngineer is offline
Registered User
AKA: John Crombe
FRC #0910 (Foley Freeze)
Team Role: Coach
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Rookie Year: 2005
Location: Madison Heights, MI
Posts: 108
FoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond reputeFoleyEngineer has a reputation beyond repute
Re: Using Treads this year?

Quote:
Originally Posted by TankChain View Post
Hello,

All my name is Josh Updyke and I have actually designed a modular tack system which I think might be helpful to some of the teams. I actually got a few people sending me emails about it which is what lead me to this forum.

I tried to make a formal post about our product, but it did not seem to go through. But I saw this thread while looking for my original post and thought I would post a link.

www.tankchain.com

We are happy to get track to anyone that would like it. I know that there are a lot of teams interested in tracks. We do the molding in house right now, but have established a relationship with a partner injection molding company and have plans to get these made in bulk. However, our demand has not been high enough to need this. Our break even point to do injection molding is right around 25 kits. If we acted quickly I think we could get the parts in 4-5 weeks. Which is cutting it close from what I hear. But our standard delivery is is around 2 weeks, for all the orders up until we max out our production capabilities.

Josh
John Crombe, Team 910 - The Foley Freeze coach here. Talked to the engineer Josh at TankChain and he sent me a sample of their treads for testing. I did a coefficient of friction test for it on aluminum, Lexan, and carpet as that pretty closely simulates what we'll be traveling over. I found that it was about 1.07 on aluminum, 1.13 on Lexan and 1.13 on carpet. As a reference, using the blue nitrile tread, we got .71 on aluminum, .71 on Lexan and 1.42 on carpet. We actually climbed the barriers with the nitrile tread and it didn't do well on them (with that .71 value we're not surprised). It was only because of the driving wheels behind on carpet that we were able to get over them. It looks like the TankChain will do well on all surfaces.

I think the TankChain solution can be a good solution as it's easy to use in place of wheels and eliminates all of the width for drive chains connecting all of your axles. You just power the TankChain's double #35 chains with double sprockets once, and every other place you want to change the path of your tread, you just drop in idler sprockets. VexPro and Andymark have some pretty light and inexpensive aluminum ones.

We didn't have enough tread to do a whole robot. They're in the middle of getting a big production run going to try and meet the demand from teams. It will be interesting to see a complete system in action. I understand there's a team in New York that used them last year.

Worth a look anyway. Nice people to work with.

John
__________________

2014 Buckeye Champions - thanks 846 & 639, Troy Champions - thanks 33 & 5193, Imagery, Entrepreneurship & Industrial Design Awards
2013 Kettering Champions - thanks 70 & 862, Three Imagery Awards
2012 Western Mich Finalist - thanks 1918 & 85
2011 Trav. City Web Site, Troy Xerox, Mich State Semi Finalist & Judges Awards
2010 Kettering Champion - thanks 67 & 70, Kettering Rockwell Innovation 2010 Troy Finalists - thanks 33 & 288, and Rockwell Innovation
2009 Kettering QF, Detroit Finalists Detroit Creativity Award, Troy Semi-Finalists Troy Creativity Award
2008 WMRI Finalists - thanks 1243 and 904, 2008 Kettering Champion - thanks 67, 1075 and 2619
2008 IRI Judges Award Winner, Great Lakes Finalists - thanks 66 & 217, Western Mich
2007 Curie Division Champions - thanks 330 & 1270