Tiny wheel

[JesseK]

Only thing that hasn't been mentioned thus far is tread wear. Smaller wheels turn more revolutions per distance traveled, thus the tread will wear down faster. Probably not an issue with Colsons.

There may also be something to be said about traction when dealing with non-smoothed treads (i.e. Blue Nitrile or Orange Roughtop). Larger wheels have more contact patch with the carpet fibers vs tiny wheels, thus there are more fibers to push against, meaning increased traction in the forward direction. There is a tradeoff point of where this benefit is removed on very large wheels (> 4"-ish?) However, this is only conjecture based upon findings that 4"x1.5" wide roughtop gets more traction than 4"x1" wide roughtop on FRC carpet (I swear there used to be a whitepaper somewhere...).

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Only thing that hasn't been mentioned thus far is tread wear. Smaller wheels turn more revolutions per distance traveled, thus the tread will wear down faster. Probably not an issue with Colsons.

There may also be something to be said about traction when dealing with non-smoothed treads (i.e. Blue Nitrile or Orange Roughtop). Larger wheels have more contact patch with the carpet fibers vs tiny wheels, thus there are more fibers to push against, meaning increased traction in the forward direction. There is a tradeoff point of where this benefit is removed on very large wheels (> 4"-ish?) However, this is only conjecture based upon findings that 4"x1.5" wide roughtop gets more traction than 4"x1" wide roughtop on FRC carpet (I swear there used to be a whitepaper somewhere...).

Actually fox46 and Rob both brought that up earlier on this very page. Accelerated tread wear is definitely another drawback to smaller wheels.