6WD chain path

[Dylan Gramlich]

do this and it will be simple yet effective.

take a few pieces of paper, cut out pieces for your wheel and trans. then place them on the ground like how you will mount them. then take string and mock it up as chain.

that should help you out.

[sanddrag]

The best way to do this is have the Dewalt gearboxes direct drive your center wheel axles by means of flexible coupling (I recommend aluminum 3 jaw spider couplings made my Lovejoy and sold through Applied Industrial). Then just run a chain from the center to the front, and from the center to the back, on each side. If you have to, you can really drive any wheel from the Dewalt, but the centers are preferable because they are always in contact with the ground (if the center wheels are offset relatively lower than the rest). If you have to space to do it, you should avoid having 6 chains. It is more potential failure points.

EDIT: I missed the "total of four" thing

[Billfred]

Last year, 1293 did 6WD off of the Kit gearbox. We ran two chains off of the gearbox, one to the rear wheel and one to the center wheel, which then ran a chain to the front wheel. Worked beautifully--even when we threw chains from balls riding into the frame (a problem we fixed with bolts), we never threw enough chains to immobilize ourselves.

[lukevanoort]

In our 2006 'bot we used 6WD drive with the KOP tranny and frame. Our robot had its gearbox between the center and rear wheel with two chains, the "interior" one ran from the tranny to the center wheel, then front, then back to the tranny, the "exterior" one went to the center, then rear, then back to the tranny. There is a picture on the robot's FIRSTwiki entry that might help make sense of my description. The upshot of this layout was, with just two chains, we achieved pretty good redundancy, and any one chain could drop and maintain 5WD (really 4WD) capability, which was handy several times.

[Cody Carey]

Direct drive the middle wheel from a live axel, and run chain out to the other two, that way... no single chain failure can cost you an entire drive side. The only downfall is that you have to make custom hubs for the middle wheels.

In the below diagram... the blue is the chain, the black rectangles are the wheels, and the yellow boxes are the Dewalt Trannys. The middle wheel would be driven by the grey box, which is the live axel... The outlying wheels would be driven by chain and ride on dead axels.


Edit: I know that this would only use two of the motors... but it would be very easy to go with a setup like the one below as well:

You would just need to machine more hubs...