We bought and assembled 4 AndyMark mecanum wheels.
The rollers seem to be tight, as in not turning well, therefore prohibiting the robot to ‘crab walk’. Our next step would be to add a couple of washers to the six center spacers to ease tension on the rollers. Has anyone else come across this problem? Has anyone tried any type of lube (don’t want to make our $$ wheels all messy unless if we have heard someone else has tried it )
BTW, I’m not on the mechanical team. I just need these wheels done and mounted so I can start programming, so I’ve decided to take the initiative to getting that done sooner.
Yes. We have come across the same problem. You can loosen the screws, but I’m sure you’ve tried that already.
This may take quite a bit of time, but during assembly or the production of the plates, some of the tabs might have been bent a little bit too much or too less. So, someone would have to go in with a pair of pliers and bend the tabs such so that the wheels spin freely.
Thanks. It sounded like it would work, but it just seems so time consuming… I spent 2 hours today simply swapping out 4x6 (24) bolts in the center of the wheels because they were too long. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a faster way…
Ya… we came across the same thing. Kinda wondering if one or more of the jigs or presses isn’t set right and causing mechanical difficulties on the back side. On the next note, does anybody know how fast those rollers wear. We’ve ran our frame for several hours and we are noticing some wear, more than what I had expected.
We’ve been driving this thing for at least an hour every day for a week and I haven’t seen any problems with the rollers wearing down. Are the rollers really loose or do they stick in place?
Yeah… We ran ours for about 15 minutes and started to notice the rubber starting to chip (not sure of the technical word…) Granted, our rollers aren’t fixed yet and are dragging on the floor, and we haven’t tried it on the carpet yet, just simply using tile floor… But still, they seem to wear fast.
We will fix the rollers on Monday and I’ll let you guys know exactly how we did it so that other teams with the same problem can fix theirs. Sunday is our day off (mine at least )
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