Seal of Approval

[Aaron Lussier]

I was just wondering, at Nationals I was the guy on my team that stood in front of the pit and handed out flyers and did PR for my team. Anyway part of my speech was to show every person who walked by our bright, shiny aluminium wheels ( for any body who was in our division some one on your team talked to me about my teams robot). Sorry I'm getting off the subject I eventually got around to showing the wheels to the CEO of our sponsor BAE SYSTEMS, then he brought this guy over who was like " these are awsome I want Dean to see these so I lent him a wheel and he showed it to Dean. It came back signed by three people Dean, Woody, And this guy Dave Lavery who I did not know at the time (I do now) The guy who gave it back to me said " Dave will be coming by later to take a closer look at these" I asked him who Dave was and he explained who he was. Sorry off the subject again. Anyway I never left the pit that day just soo I would not miss him when he did show up, I did my little PR speech "yack yack yack Robot, wheel" then he gave me this pin the had a picture of a guy in a hawian shirt giving a thumbs up with the words "Dave Lavery's seal of approval"

The point is, did any other teams get one of these pins and what did they get it for. Just wondering

P.S. If I sound full of my self in that story, Sorry I helped make the wheels myself and they are my Pride and Joy from this season.

[Rob Colatutto]

i don't think my team got one, but i remember hearing you tell me about it for an hour while i talked to you in your pit, hehe. we were right behind you if you remember and your wheels were quite awesome

[Ashley Weed]

Would you post a picture of those awesome wheels?

[Aaron Lussier]

My computer is being dumb I'll have pictures of the wheel and the pin as soon as I figure out whats wrong.

[MissInformation]

You want to know the real reason frozen fish are orbiting Jupiter? Because Dave Lavery put them there!



I have a Lavery Seal of Approval pin, so I can only contend I have approval for posting funny pictures of Dave! How's that for reasoning? Of course, our whole team got pins by default, so you should be very proud of your pin!

MissInformation

<===========>
When the mouse is away, this cat will play.

[AdamT]

I have a pin, and when robotics season comes around, you will not see me without mine. Dave is a great guy and has done more for this program then most of the people in it know. Wear it with pride!!

[Madison]

I want a pin!

I only managed to snag an official, autographed Dave Lavery business card. . .

[Aaron Lussier]

Originally posted by weedie
Would you post a picture of those awesome wheels?

Check these out.

P.S. Any questions on how they were made just ask.

[Aaron Lussier]

And here is a picutre of the pin I got.

[Ashley Weed]

Originally posted by The wheelman


Check these out.

P.S. Any questions on how they were made just ask.

Those are really cool. I can't really tell but are they all metal or do they have some type of rubber on them? Did they ever tear up the carpet at competition?

*Evulish - how would you like to maintain those for me!!!!

[Aaron Lussier]

Originally posted by weedie


Those are really cool. I can't really tell but are they all metal or do they have some type of rubber on them? Did they ever tear up the carpet at competition?

Nope no rubber 100% machined aluminium of the highest grade. These wheels have never ever torn up the carpet. We have pulled robots with those rubbers skyway wheels and they tore up the carpet trying to pull aganist us.

[Ashley Weed]

Are they something that was made during the six build weeks, or thought of before then. How big of a project is it to make them? How do they compare in weight to Skyway wheels? Did they ever hurt you, or did they always give the advantage?

[Aaron Lussier]

Originally posted by weedie
Are they something that was made during the six build weeks, or thought of before then. How big of a project is it to make them? How do they compare in weight to Skyway wheels? Did they ever hurt you, or did they always give the advantage?

We thought of them about half way through week 1, one of the student drafters modeled it in Pro-E like 20 times experimenting with tread pattern and such then, during week 2 or 3 we realized that it was going to cost 3500 dollars to make ten of those wheels (extras and such) so me and three other kids on our team set out to make them ourselves lucky we have a machine shop at our high school (which is the only thing the school ever gave or let us use) We printed out the blue prints and showed them to our shop teacher. These are the steps involved in making the wheels:

- Use big cold saw to cut ten blanks from six inch round stock
- Face off both sides
- Center drill all blanks
- Use a letter N drill to drill a hole out in each one
- Make a steel wheel holder with tap
- Begin process of hogging out the majority of the material to be removed
- Write a CNC program for the bolt hole circle to make spokes
- Write a CNC program to cut the spokes
- Make a custom pair of alumminium chuck jaws to hold the wheels
- Place hogged out blanks in jaws and run bolt hole program on all ten
- Ream all holes on drill press
- Use small cut in soft jaws to make sure wheels is lined up for spoke cutting
- Cut all spokes
- Use a 90 degree ground tool bit to make ridges, measure using a dial indicator
- Place wheels three at a time on to indexing head set up indexing head to rotate 7 1/2 degrees every time around
- Take a 1/4 inch cut
- 360 / 7.5 = 48 little notches all the way around
- Remove from indexing head and cool under water
- DONE!!!!!

All of that took four students and a shop teacher one week to complete. Each wheel weighs about one pound I'm not sure how much skyway wheels weigh but it's most likely more.

Did they ever hurt me yea I got one caught on my shirt and it ripped it. Ohh you mean the robot yea If we did not have the red side of our robot transfering weight from the goal to our bot then we would not have as much traction. and we usually had the advantage except aganist team who had better drive sytems and traction.

Hope that answers all your questions if anybody has any more just post them

[Chris]

The wheels worked out really good, they had enough traction to give us a fairly good advantage, but spun before the breakers popped. Post season we tried some rubber wheels with team 60 tread, but it was too much and we popped breakers. As the driver for our bot its my opinon that our wheels were great,

however as aaron mentioned we did get beat by the better bot at Nationals. We were in the 6th seeded alliance in curie. with 138, 254, 151 kind of a cinderall story in round one we defeated the 3rd seeded alliance, Then going against the second seed alliance 353, 267, 343 the first round with 254, 138 vs 267, 343 was lost, then 254, 151 vs 353, 267 we 151 got two goals while 254 was able to hold off the amazing drive system of 267 (ussomething like 760to1 reduction) and 353 wasn't able to push us. so we had all three goals and won. Then in the final match 151,254vs343, 267 we 151 tried to hold off 267 while 254 mixed it up with 343.
Each 254 and 343 got a goal and we 151 got slowly pushed across the field, the wheels just spun going against such a powerful robot. But it was still the best year during my tenure on the team and was much fun :-)

Chris C
Currently Teamless
00-02 Team 151 the Wildcards

[Ashley Weed]

I shared the info. with the other driver. I think they are very unique, and in my years, I have yet to see anything like them. I don't think I could ever convince him to try out a different type of wheel though, or even something similar. We were very successful with our wheels this year too. We used to use four of the wheel chair wheels. We upgraded to large (mini swamper) Skyway wheels this year. They were awesome directly from Skyway, but our wheelman (evulish) made them even better. Maybe I can get him to post a picture of the wheels after he perfected them.