2012 KOP wheels

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by nick_sheets

We ran the KOP wheels this year and weren't very happy with them. The older kit wheels that teams had were much nicer, I believe 2008. As a team, we switched our bot to colsons for demo's and such. The driving is much better on them and we figured if its about ~$60 or so bucks more for Colsons over KOP wheels. We'll go colson hands down.

Nick

Can you please expand on this? Why weren't you happy?

[bardd]

We used them as a part of a somewhat peculiar setup: we had a 8WD (all leveled together), where the two wheels (on each side) in the center are performence wheels with roughtop treads, the wheels in the back (where the CoG is) were 2012 KOP wheels and the wheels up front (which was really light) were omni wheels. Since we had higher tracktion wheels it's hard to really tell how the KOP wheels performed throughout, but when getting on the bridge, when the robot still touches the ground, the only wheels with grip are the KOP wheels and the omni wheels, for the performence wheels are in the air). We never had problems getting up the bridge, which tells me these wheels have some heavy grip (I don't believe we can hold it for the omni wheels nearly as much as for the KOP wheels).

[JB]

We used 6 of these this year on our six wheel direct drive tank system. They were great for bridge climbing and pushing people around. They did show some wear after 5-6 competitions, which is to be expected. My only complaint was that they were to squishy, meaning that even though we dropped our center wheel by .125 we still encountered wheel scrub. To combat this issue we just turned the front two and back two wheels down until we obtained the desired ride height. But otherwise they were great and I would definitely recommend them in the right circumstances.