CVT, which teams are planning on using them for next year?

[team222badbrad]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Wouldn't that aluminum wheel + rubber wheel have a fairly large amount of friction losses? I mean, unless the rubber wheel has a very small contact point, then it's going to slip along pretty much all of its surface cause the aluminum disk will be travelling faster at the outer edge vs the inner edge. As I understand it, that's why other roller designs use hard rubber designed to contact at a point.

And in answer to the thread, 57 doesn't look to be using a CVT in the foreseeable future.

The gum rubber drive wheels as about 3'' in diameter and was about 1/2'' thick.

We probably could have Knurled the aluminum disk, like Sanddrag said, but that would probably eat up the rubber quickly.

Like you said, I think the design would have probably worked better with a drive wheel that had a curved contact point rather than one with a flat contact point 1/2'' wide on the aluminum disk.

We basically scrapped the prototype because we knew that it would be very difficult to get enough power the the wheels, without the drive wheels slipping.

I am sure we could still make it work.

Thinking back, we could probably have added a lot pressure to the drive wheels, thus we would have needed to add thrust bearings on the wheels.

We also probably could have made a better method of moving the drive wheels in and out on the disk.