Sheet Metal, 8-Wheel Drive Design

[woodenLogicGate]

Hello All,

This year our team is looking into using sheet metal to manufacture a drive train and possibly other components of our robot. We are new to sheet metal design and manufacturing and would like to get your input on our current design.



The general design is an 8-wheel drive with the middle two wheels lowered so that the robot normally drives on the middle 4 wheels. The sheet metal is 0.09" thickness. We're using Vex Pro's 3-stage ball shifters to directly drive two of the wheels on hex-shafts, and the rest are chained and dead-axle.

Here's a side view of the drive train. The middle wheels are lowered 1/16" from the outer wheels



Here is a top view of one of the drive modules. vertical discs that you see here are actually sprockets. Please comment on our chaining/sprocket setup. The piston is a concept for a brake. The white cross members are part of a tensioning system.



We've calculated that our speed in low gear should be about 5.2 ft/s and our speed in high gear will be nearly 12 ft/s (probably a little less). Are these reasonable ratios to give good acceleration at start and good top speed?

Thank you for your feedback