Grinding down skyways

[sdcantrell56]

I am wondering how people grind down the skyway wheels when they don't have a lathe?

[abeD]

I remember at competition we just ran the bot and held a file up to the wheel, if you have your drivetrain setup run it and just hold a file to the wheel, but as always be very careful when you do this make sure you're being safe.

[Bill_Hancoc]

safety is key but try to put the file in a place so that the end is wedged against something such as the frame so you can put a lil more leverage on it and grind faster. this is really messy so i suggest put down like newspaper first to speed clean up or do it outside or better yet get a shop-vac

[DonRotolo]

We used a belt sander instead of a file, holding the sander at almost a 90 degree angle to the rotation.

Don

[Sachiel7]

Last year our team took a belt sander to the skyway wheels with them latched in a vice. We had someone do them very evenly.
Then we got some of the wedge top tread from mcmaster and cutout strips to go around the wheels.
We then lined the outer edge of the wheels and the bottom of the tread with E6000 (great stuff) which you can usually find in most craft stores actually (not sure why, its a super strength glue)
Next, we tie-wrapped the tread around the wheel. finally, we drilled out holes to put in two pop rivets on each end of the tread, and riveted them in.
One night later, and we had super treaded skyways.
just take off the tiewraps and they're set.
You may want to use a stronger epoxy to hold on the tread, and possibly add a few more rivets around the wheel. They held up great in competition though, and gave us lots of traction.

[Karthik]

I've moved the posts about design sharing to http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=42172 . Should be some interesting discussions.

[Jonathan Norris]

We did something very similar last year, and all we needed was a few small wood screws to keep the tread on .

[Stephen Kowski]

http://www.team1369.org/team13692/Ph...%201%20014.jpg
http://www.team1369.org/team13692/Ph...%201%20021.jpg

We took the skyways to a lathe and took them down significantly....because they are a glass filled polymer we need to keep sharpening the tooling we used, but from there we drilled through and pop rivetted them on. I would reccomend it to anyone using a skyway wheel.