pic: 1918 NC Gears

[themccannman]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Yeah, I'm aware that modeling the frictional forces between these types of wheels and carpets is rather complicated. I was sort of hoping the OP had done some of those "robot against wall" tests as motivation for having that many wheels and could share the results with us.

So, in your experience, wheel wear scales pretty much linearly with weight supported? That's good to know.

Geometrically, but yes, in my experience. It should pretty always, I can't imagine why it wouldn't, when a wheel rubs on a surface it loses an amount of material relative to hardness of the rubber, the hardness of the surface, and the pressure on the wheel. For a given pressure, the wheel will lose the same amount of material. This means that a wider wheel loses the same amount of material as a thinner wheel, the difference is that the thinner wheel loses depth much faster. If both wheels have the same tread depth then the thinner wheel will use up all of it's tread sooner than they wider wheel simply because the wider wheel has more material on it. If the rubber and surface hardness are constant, the pressure should be the only thing to substantially affect wheel wear.