Help!!..wheels?

[gorrilla]

Originally Posted by NorviewsVeteran

If you were having trouble turning, you might look into omni wheels.

or shorten the wheelbase

[Sam N.]

How strange...

1351 uses AndyMark kit wheels on a six-wheel rocker. We have never had any problems with the wheels except for their weight. Our wheels survived two regionals and one off-season event as well as being driven on concrete to show sponsors.

How much scuffing do your wheels endure?

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by Sam N.

How strange...

1351 uses AndyMark kit wheels on a six-wheel rocker. We have never had any problems with the wheels except for their weight. Our wheels survived two regionals and one off-season event as well as being driven on concrete to show sponsors.

How much scuffing do your wheels endure?

Include Nationals and offseason presentations!

[Bruce Newendorp]

An alternative to omni wheels on one end and high traction wheels on the other end is to use the relatively hard black plastic wheels typical of caster wheels on one end and high traction wheels at the other end. We have found it to be a very good mix of providing some resistance to being pushed from the side but still providing a benefit of 4 wheel drive. This setup also allows good turning. The black plastic wheels do wear out and sometimes get chunks broken out of them so they typically last 1 - 2 regionals but are relatively cheap and depending on the drive train setup can be easy to replace.

[Bruce Newendorp]

One more thing - Colson wheels work well for the high traction end and they are affordable.

http://rigs-n-wheels.com/store.php?catid=62

Colson wheels aren't bad, but their traction isn't the best either.

If you have access to a manual mill with a rotary table, put some 1/4 inch plate on there, mill it round, punch some holes, then weld it into the center of a 4inch ID aluminum pipe. Poof, High-Tech traction wheels for cheap! If you're missing the Mill part, check out your local community college; many of them have shops and would love to help you out.

[=Martin=Taylor=]

Originally Posted by Bruce Newendorp

One more thing - Colson wheels work well for the high traction end and they are affordable.

http://rigs-n-wheels.com/store.php?catid=62

The colson wheels are great.

They actually have very good traction. Yes, conveyor belting has far more traction when it is new... but it doesn't stay new for long Remember wedge-top was designed for handling food.... I hope food isn't as dirty as the FIRST carpets... You'll need to keep replacing wedge-top or rough-top for it to stay fresh.

Colsons don't have this problem. They are designed for dirty environments like shop floors. And when they heat up from friction, they actually gain more traction.

They also wear very well. One set will last you a whole season. And when you're done, just throw the hole wheel away and get a new one! That’s how cheap they are!

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII

The colson wheels are great.

They actually have very good traction. Yes, conveyor belting has far more traction when it is new... but it doesn't stay new for long Remember wedge-top was designed for handling food.... I hope food isn't as dirty as the FIRST carpets... You'll need to keep replacing wedge-top or rough-top for it to stay fresh.

Colsons don't have this problem. They are designed for dirty environments like shop floors. And when they heat up from friction, they actually gain more traction.

They also wear very well. One set will last you a whole season. And when you're done, just throw the hole wheel away and get a new one! That’s how cheap they are!

Nitrile roughtop wears extremely well, and is a good compromise for this situation. I still prefer natural rubber or SBR tread, and just changing wheels often. It seems to be worth the traction advantage.

[gorrilla]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Nitrile roughtop wears extremely well, and is a good compromise for this situation. I still prefer natural rubber or SBR tread, and just changing wheels often. It seems to be worth the traction advantage.

also the weight distribution over the wheels, could be a factor on the quickness of wear,

last years robot was two wheel drive with almost all the weight on the front two, we had great traction, but we couldent turn well, and the tread wore down to nothing after the FL. Regional!

[daltore]

Our team has been looking at Colsons. Last year we had 4-inch IFI wheels with wedge-top for low-weight and low center of gravity, but we also wanted to go fast, so our wheels ended up rotating at about a thousand RPM, and we had to replace a set of treads (that's 6 treads for us) at lunch on practice day, and we've had to replace them again since then. The Colsons are a great solution, at about $5 a wheel, they're MUCH cheaper than almost any other good robot wheel, and they offer a pretty good amount of traction if you get the Performa rubber type, and they also last a LONG time. Two other companies that offer similar wheels are NPC, which are made for battle bots, but are much more expensive and don't have quite the life of Colsons, and Banebots, but their treads wear off like a Firestone tire. These wheels are used in the battle bots world more than almost any other wheel, and most of the people I've talked to love them. If you make a custom hub in the middle out of delrin or aluminum, you can put a key between it and the wheel, and then key it so it fits on a 1/2" or 5/8" shaft, to which you can connect a sprocket. Simple, fewer moving parts (bearings) than the IFI wheels, about the same weight, and very rugged.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by daltore

Simple, fewer moving parts (bearings) than the IFI wheels, about the same weight, and very rugged.

That shaft still has to sit in bearings, so I wouldn't say it is fewer moving parts or inherently more reliable.

[=Martin=Taylor=]

We press-fit the colsons on the AM hubs and put three 10-32's through the hub plate to secure them.

Works great and takes like only a couple minutes to assemble.

Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII

... but it doesn't stay new for long

I agree with you here, for wedgetop. Blue Nitrile Roughtop is among the most durable tread materials I've used. Over the 2007 and 2008 season, using the robot for both competition and demos, we NEVER changed our tread on each bot. Never had a problem with roughtop wearing. Wedgetop, on the other hand....

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Nitrile roughtop wears extremely well, and is a good compromise for this situation. I still prefer natural rubber or SBR tread, and just changing wheels often. It seems to be worth the traction advantage.

Nitrile rocks. Never had a bad experience with it. Just lay it against an AM wheel that's been stripped of the polyurethane, drill some holes and slap a few pop rivets in. It's janky, but it WORKS.

Originally Posted by gorrilla

also the weight distribution over the wheels, could be a factor on the quickness of wear,

last years robot was two wheel drive with almost all the weight on the front two, we had great traction, but we couldent turn well, and the tread wore down to nothing after the FL. Regional!

Yeah, weight distribution is key. I've mostly used roughtop on our 6 wheels, and had no problems there. The closest we got to wearing tread out was on our 2005 Crab Drive, for Triple Play, and that wasn't bad enough for the bot to be at a disadvantage.

Seriously, if you do your attaching right, you can't go wrong with Blue Nitrile (assuming FIRST keeps the carpet....).

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Hachiban VIII

The colson wheels are great.

They actually have very good traction. Yes, conveyor belting has far more traction when it is new... but it doesn't stay new for long Remember wedge-top was designed for handling food.... I hope food isn't as dirty as the FIRST carpets... You'll need to keep replacing wedge-top or rough-top for it to stay fresh.

Colsons don't have this problem. They are designed for dirty environments like shop floors. And when they heat up from friction, they actually gain more traction.

They also wear very well. One set will last you a whole season. And when you're done, just throw the hole wheel away and get a new one! That’s how cheap they are!

I'll also throw support to the Colson wheels for three main reasons: durability, cost, and fabrication time necessary.

Durability: There are a lot of offseason competitions in the Northeast every year. Couple that onto the official scrimmage in February, and two official FRC competitions, and one of 228's robots can see eight to nine competitions a year. In New England.

The hard defense played up here really wears down Roughtop fast. We've been able to get an entire season out of a single application of Roughtop before, but after the first competition it already lost a considerable amount of traction. Colson wheels on the other hand (the 5"x2" Performa ones to be exact), went through eight competitions this past year without any noticeable change in performance.

Cost: At between $4 and $10, you will be hard pressed to find better wheels elsewhere for this cost.

Fabrication Time: About ten minutes per wheel, depending on how you do it. The approach 228 uses is to take aluminum rod, turn down the outside to a diameter slightly oversize past the diameter of Colson wheel hole, bore out the inside to axle diameter, knurl the outside of aluminum rod, use cutoff tool to cut off about 1-1.5" piece, use arbor press to broach hole with keyway, and then use arbor press to press aluminum rod insert into the Colson wheel. You now have a completed live-axle Colson wheel.



If dead axles is more your thing, then take one of the thinner 7/8" wide Colson wheels, put it on a rotary table, and drill three-six holes through the wheel, which you can then mount sprockets to.

Sure, they aren't as pretty necessarily as custom machined wheels, but at a final cost of about $10 a piece, ten minutes of machining time, and a sky-high reliability, they can't really be beat. And from an engineering perspective, that's beautiful.

[gorrilla]

inlflateable wheels, dont wear down very easily......