Seal of Approval

[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