3D Printed Treads for MaxSwerve

[Zook]

I’ve been playing around with making my own 3D printed treads for the REV Max Swerve aluminum wheels. Reason? The stock rubber MaxSwerve wheels have a short live, and the aluminum wheels have a smaller width than the tread you can buy on many websites.
And if it’s white tread, we can drive the robot in the hall with no carpet… without leaving visible markings.

There is already a thread for fully printed wheels, and treads for the plastic hubs:

REV MaxSwerve 3D printed Wheel set

We want to share our 3D printed wheel set for the Rev MaxSwerve [20230227_142323] The wheel is printed in ABS and the tire is printed in TPU. We use three brass inserts 6-32 We printed the wheel in two pieces without support and glue them together. [20230227_142437_001] The tire is pressed onto the wheel. We used a woodworker clamp, but an arbor press would work much better. A flat screwdriver is used to separate the wheel/tire. [20230227_142521] The wheel can also be made by sanding t…

And there is a thread for 3D printed wheels and treads for the SDS wheels that I posted to before:

TPU90A Grippy Tire CAD published (Finally)

Printing Ok here. We’ll have tread wheels as well in case prints don’t hold up to testing [IMG_1834]

I think making a dedicated spot for my stuff was in order. And for any general projects people are working on.

Onshape

So… I started with these treads, Printed in Overture TPU (90A I think). There was some wall separation, but it looked fine for testing. Students installed them and said with the bolts tight the treads were misshapen and oval. Driving around was very noisy.

Since the team was busy with other things, I decided to pause work. Recently I added recesses for the buttonhead bolt heads. I printed one up and it seems to fit perfectly.

STL (mm units): MSTread ridged.stl - Google Drive
Printed with 3 walls, 50% infill, 0.6mm nozzle.

We’ll be testing these tomorrow. I’ll post the results.

[Domtech]

@Zook

and the aluminum wheels have a smaller width than the tread you can buy on many websites.

Have you seen the 3 inch billet aluminum swerve wheel offering from The Thrifty Bot?

Or my 3d printable version? Available here: TheNiftyBot.com - 3 Inch Swerve Wheels

[Britt]

we’ve seen some great success with printing the tread as a closed circle that is 2% smaller than the diameter of the aluminum hub (4" wheel) and stretching it on, especially just if you are using it for driving on the gym floor or around the hallways it should be fine. It has entirely removed the need for bolts, though we might add a but of hot glue next time to keep the tread in place. you will have to cut the tread off if you want to replace them because they sit too tight once they get on, but installation is a breeze.

[Technologyman00]

@Domtech

Have you seen the 3 inch billet aluminum swerve wheel offering from The Thrifty Bot?

I think that is specifically what is referenced bc you can’t easily get 1in tread from McMaster Carr

[Zook]

Yes. Team 4738 showed them to me at Beach Blitz. Figured I’d try to make use of the wheels we already had for testing. May upgrade to the wider wheels in the future.

I’ll have to check out your wheels too. Need to get some PETG filament.

[RisenFalcon]

Thrifty sells 1in tread

[Domtech]

You can pretty easily get 1inch tread from FRC suppliers, but the Rev wheels take .85" wide tread.

[Zook]

Some long overdue updates!
Got all four treads on the robot and (after a lot of wiring troubleshooting… not sure what happened after Beach Blitz) did some testing.

Students drove the robot fairly aggressively on the tiles in the hallway for about an hour to check for visible scuffing or marking, and it was pretty “clean”. You could see scuffs where the robot slid around some, but you could rub them off with your shoe.

Then they went to town on the cheap non-frc carpet in our room. The carpet faired less well than the treads.

Definitely some wear. The peaks are less peaky, and the driving seems to have applied a fillet to the edges. The main reason for printing these was to have wheels we could drive in the hall without carpet. The students think that the treads, in this current version, would be good for one day at competition. May do some more testing with better printer settings, and different TPU, but I’d say these will serve their main purpose. We’ll likely also buy the Thrifty wheels and 1in neoprene for comp.

Note: the layer separation seen in the picture is how the treads looked right off the printer and did not get any worse.

[Colin935]

935 has been playing with 3d printing the entire wheel, hub to tread and all.

[Ashe]

Has anyone made a spiky version of these treads? Would love to do some driving tests before Wk1.

[Zook]

I did not. But I thought someone else did. The ridged version held up pretty well.

[bcon]

@Eliot

[Eliot]

I made ones for ttb wheels, not the wheels rev sells.
It should be fairly straightforward to modify the cad file though.

TPU90A Grippy Tire CAD published (Finally)

You can pretty easily make a copy and modify the “TPU tread” tab of this document to do this. The one I made was for the thrifty wheel unfortunately.

Personally, I’d recommend printing full wheel TPU tires and not using the billet wheels.
Design here:

WildStang Robotics Program: Team 111 and 112 Build Blog - 2024

TPU Wheels Over the last few months, a team of four students (including me) have been working on making and testing 3D printable wheels for MAXSwerve. FRC team 88 worked on wheels much like these, releasing a design at the end of the 2023 competition season. We saw their design and wanted to try to adapt it to MAXSwerve. Why? Go fast or get passed. These wheels have a special spike pattern that grips into carpet, allowing wheels to achieve a much higher coefficient of friction (COF) than stand…