pic: West coast drive design

[Hawiian Cadder]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Are you speaking with experience?

I was too busy at nationals to collect any real information so I had our scouting team (we had no chance of picking or being picked, so they had not much to do) collect information from 250 ish teams (the number there with custom skid steer tank drive (did not ask about any other drive-train, did not ask about kit-frames), this data included:

which wheels were dropped, and by how much (or if omnis were used)
wheel diam
speed / speeds
motors in drive-train
width of track

One or more of them (dont know which) wrote addition info on material thickness. I don't know if it was sheet-metal or tubes, but there was a definite correlation between more wheels, and thinner materiel. What I don't know is if this was because more wheels weigh more and so they were trying to save weight, or if they actually looked at any FEA or prototypes and decided that with less weight on each wheel the frame would experience less stress and thus could be thinner, teams were more likely to use thicker materiel if they were using larger wheels.


edit: info also included distance between wheels