pic: Coaxial Swerve Drive Module with 2-speed Ball Drive and Nitrile Tread

[Jared]

Originally Posted by Bryce2471

I really love this design overall. I've wanted to design a swerve with a single reduction ball-shifter for quite some time. I do have some questions and concerns though.

1. It looks like there is no thrust bearing above the vertical miter gear. This is not a big deal by its self, (We used thrust washers last year) but it will increase the speed of deterioration on the gears, and decrease efficiency in that gear-set. It also looks like you're planning on using the VEX Pro aluminum Miter gears. This is also not a big deal, lots of team use them, but I suspect the fact that they are aluminum will increase wear speed. With those two things combined, your drive performance may not suffer, but you will probably find yourselves replacing the miter gears pretty often. What is the process for replacing a miter gear? How long will it take?
2. How many man-hours will you spend to machine all the parts? How about to assemble the modules? I feel like you could have designed a module with the same performance, that would have been much less resource demanding to build.
?

I don't see how not having a thrust bearing reduces the life of the gears. It may affect the life and efficiency of the 0.375" bearing sitting above it though.

We've done something similar with our climber (3 CIMs on a 10:1 worm reduction) with the worm resting against the inner race of a normal radial bearing, and we saw no issues.