pic: Spectrum Prototype Robot

[Panthers 3181]

How did you bend your tube and What material did you use?

[philso]

Sorry to hear about the bad day you and your team had, Allen. I have no doubt that you all have the fortitude to keep on working so that you have a bunch of good days.

After searching CD, I found a few instances of the same sort of thing happening with the larger Vex mecanums though they seem to have occurred after much more use and abuse. Is there any chance that there is any way to free up the binding rollers? I will take a look on Monday but, unfortunately, they look like they are not meant to be disassembled for servicing once they leave the factory.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Panthers 3181

How did you bend your tube and What material did you use?

1/2" EMT Conduit and a conduit bender. The bender is about $40 dollars and 10 feet of conduit is under $2 for us locally. We bought about 60 ft so we could screw up a bunch as we learned to bend it well.

Originally Posted by philso

After searching CD, I found a few instances of the same sort of thing happening with the larger Vex mecanums though they seem to have occurred after much more use and abuse.

We had read those as well, we had assumed we would be replacing the wheels after our two regionals and before championship/off-seasons. I didn't expect to have to change a wheel after one week. It's partly our fault, we wanted to believe.

Originally Posted by Electronica1

I am starting to notice a trend here, the people who are having issues with the vex mecanum wheels are the people who are using 8 motors on their drive. (the only instances I can think of are Boom Done and Spectrum)

That's interesting, I don't see why that would cause the problem, but I'm also done putting time and thought into Mecanum wheels. I wasn't on the Mecanum bandwagon before this season and I definitely jumped clean off of it last night. Maybe we'll find out it it was our fault, I don't know but for now it's not worth the hassle.

[AllenGregoryIV]

I spoke with Paul and Aren at VEX this morning and they let me in on what caused the problem with 4" Mecanum wheels.

VEX shipped the 4" Mecanum hubs with the rollers for the 6" Mecanum wheels as a stop gap since the 4" rollers weren't ready. The 4" rollers are apparently in Greenville now and will be shipping out to all the teams that had previously ordered 4" Mecanum wheels.

The only real issue with all this is they didn't tell anyone they were doing this. So we wasted a whole lot of week 4 playing around with wheels that aren't round. Now we have decide if we want to switch back to actually round mecanum wheels or stay with the omni wheels that we put on our chassis yesterday.