Position idlers to get better chain wrap -- a question about good practices.

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

That's weird.... we had a serpentine wrap in a six motor drive and there we no problems. Never had a chain derail, ever. We still had great pushing power as well, no more power loss than a regular setup.

From the pictures in FIRST Robots: Behind the Design, it appears that the idlers that 100 had in 2006 consisted of cylinders of plastic (looks to be polyethylene or maybe nylon) so it isn't really a big surprise to me that it had high frictional losses. On the other hand, we have used ball bearing idler sprockets for the last two years, and they spin really easily even with a significant amount of force applied to the chain.