Drive Wheels

[Justin Shelley]

Originally Posted by Wing

After using both AM plaction and vexpro traction wheels now, I'm confident in saying that I love the vexpro traction wheels. I don't know what performance boost we would get from using the versa wheels over the Traction wheels with extra grip SBR black roughtop from McMaster, so I think we'll be sticking with these champs.

I have heard a lot of good news about the vexpro products, and have been considering using both the vexpro ball shifter and the vexpro traction wheels

[Mark Sheridan]

We had a lot of success with colsons this year. We were able to hold our own against teams running rough and wedge top. We did not even add grooves to our wheels. We are going to have to try a higher torque pushing gear with grooved colsons next year.

[Justin Shelley]

Originally Posted by Mark Sheridan

We had a lot of success with colsons this year. We were able to hold our own against teams running rough and wedge top. We did not even add grooves to our wheels. We are going to have to try a higher torque pushing gear with grooved colsons next year.

What size wheel did you use?

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Mark Sheridan

We had a lot of success with colsons this year. We were able to hold our own against teams running rough and wedge top. We did not even add grooves to our wheels. We are going to have to try a higher torque pushing gear with grooved colsons next year.

Over your 2 regionals this year, how much rubber wear did you experience? Do you have pictures of a new wheel vs your worn wheels now? Is there any different in diameter between the worn & new wheel ?

[EricDrost]

As for wheels, I still think Colsons are king. They're incredibly easy to use with hubs from: West Coast Products. We use 4" wheels with our own tread cut into them.

[Akash Rastogi]

3929 also had a great experience with Colsons this season. 4" Colsons in a 6 wheel WCD had minimal wear after two district events.

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphot...81089086_n.jpg

10/10 would use again.

[sodizzle]

Anyone using custom wheels? I was wondering what advantages custom wheels give. I've seen quite a few strong teams using 3D printed wheels and cnc'd aluminum wheels.

[Nemo]

It would be hard to beat the performance vs cost and ease of use of VersaWheels. It doesn't get much cheaper than $5 per wheel, and they're easy to connect to the (also inexpensive) hubs, bearings, and sprockets. I wonder if Vex will investigate different polymer materials for their tread since some teams have somehow managed to wear it down. Our team wore down the two front tires after two competitions, but we will be able to spare the $10 to replace them at the Championship. We've been very happy with the traction we get - we ended up slowing the drive down, because it took a bigger gear ratio than expected to get them traction limited.

Has anybody compared traction and durability between AndyMark 4" FIRST Wheels and 4" VersaWheels?

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by Justin Shelley

What size wheel did you use?

We used the 3.5" wheel.

Originally Posted by JesseK

Over your 2 regionals this year, how much rubber wear did you experience? Do you have pictures of a new wheel vs your worn wheels now? Is there any different in diameter between the worn & new wheel ?

I will try to get some picture later but there was hardly any wear. I remember blue specs of carpet embedded into the wheel . We had spares but we never found a need to swap them. This years drive train was a collaboration with 766. They drove their robot a lot harder (our robot spent half the match climbing), I will ask them to measure their wheels.

[Adam Freeman]

Originally Posted by EricDrost

As for wheels, I still think Colsons are king. They're incredibly easy to use with hubs from: West Coast Products. We use 4" wheels with our own tread cut into them.

We thought about using Colsons this year (we really wanted too), but could not figure out how to make a dead axle hub that worked for a 1/2" diameter shaft.

The hub wall thickness get's really thin trying to make room for a 1/2" diameter bearing.

We could have gone with 3/8" steel axles, but did not want to make that drastic a change to our wheel mounting setup.

We ended up using the 4" VEX Versa Wheel, which has been great in all situations outside of driving up the pole for climbing, when we were spinning our wheels on the tape.

We think we fixed that issue by paring a 3.875" blue banebot wheel next to the rear Versa wheel, that seemed to have given us enough traction to start the pole climb.

[Kestin Goforth]

Last year, 1503 used pneumatic wheels in an 8WD config and we found that our drop was not as much as we needed. By over-inflating the inner wheels and under-inflating the outer ones, we had a much better time turning. Though if you do this, be careful not to inflate the inner wheels too much or they can puncture much easier.

[EricH]

330 ran a 6WD all pneumatic (with drop) back in 2006. That lasted less than one event before at least one pair of pneumatics was swapped out for KOP wheels. (I forget if it was one or two, but I know the front wheels were swapped.)

[saikiranra]

We originally went with 3 inch *citation needed* Colson wheels, until we realized that we could use a small bag of zip-ties to prop up the robot (way less than a quarter inch of clearance between the ground and our chassis). We quickly CADed up some nice looking wheels and CNC Milled them out of aluminum. We also riveted on some nice, black rough-top tread for more gripy-ness. It worked and looked great!