[Jon Stratis]

Like you, we built our own mecanum wheels - for us, it was more about price than anything else - buying 8 wheels (competition and practice robots) is just way too expensive.

In our shop, we don't have a lathe (yet), laser cutter, or welder - but we can get access to those if we need them off site. for our wheels, our primary sponsor donated some machine time to cut out the patterns for us and build up the rollers. All the rest of the work was done at the shop - bending and twisting them into shape, sticking the high traction rubber on the smooth plastic wheels, and assembling the whole thing.

For 1075guy - aligning the rollers is actually pretty easy, if you have everything cut and bent correctly. We built a little jig that let us bend the "spokes" to the correct angle consistently, which helped with that a ton.

I would say the most challenging aspect was simply the time involved. We didn't have all the parts we needed until week 4 or so, and the wheels weren't assembled until week 5. That's a long delay and a lot of work into something as "basic" as wheels.