Quote:
Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII
The colson wheels are great.
They actually have very good traction. Yes, conveyor belting has far more traction when it is new... but it doesn't stay new for long  Remember wedge-top was designed for handling food.... I hope food isn't as dirty as the FIRST carpets... You'll need to keep replacing wedge-top or rough-top for it to stay fresh.
Colsons don't have this problem. They are designed for dirty environments like shop floors. And when they heat up from friction, they actually gain more traction.
They also wear very well. One set will last you a whole season. And when you're done, just throw the hole wheel away and get a new one! That’s how cheap they are! |
I'll also throw support to the Colson wheels for three main reasons: durability, cost, and fabrication time necessary.
Durability: There are a lot of offseason competitions in the Northeast every year. Couple that onto the official scrimmage in February, and two official FRC competitions, and one of 228's robots can see eight to nine competitions a year. In New England.
The hard defense played up here really wears down Roughtop fast. We've been able to get an entire season out of a single application of Roughtop before, but after the first competition it already lost a considerable amount of traction. Colson wheels on the other hand (the 5"x2" Performa ones to be exact), went through eight competitions this past year without any noticeable change in performance.
Cost: At between $4 and $10, you will be hard pressed to find better wheels elsewhere for this cost.
Fabrication Time: About ten minutes per wheel, depending on how you do it. The approach 228 uses is to take aluminum rod, turn down the outside to a diameter slightly oversize past the diameter of Colson wheel hole, bore out the inside to axle diameter, knurl the outside of aluminum rod, use cutoff tool to cut off about 1-1.5" piece, use arbor press to broach hole with keyway, and then use arbor press to press aluminum rod insert into the Colson wheel. You now have a completed live-axle Colson wheel.
If dead axles is more your thing, then take one of the thinner 7/8" wide Colson wheels, put it on a rotary table, and drill three-six holes through the wheel, which you can then mount sprockets to.
Sure, they aren't as pretty necessarily as custom machined wheels, but at a final cost of about $10 a piece, ten minutes of machining time, and a sky-high reliability, they can't really be beat. And from an engineering perspective, that's beautiful.