For those of you fortunate enough to have week zero events you can attend locally and/or practice facilities:
Did that 1-inch x 3-inch steel border make much difference in wear-and-tear on your wheels? Wondering about:
Vex Glass-filled Nylon wheels
AndyMark HiGrip wheels (“polycarbonate core”)
any aluminum wheels w/ tread
other wheels you want to mention
Or maybe you flew off the HAB2 level last year with any of those. Any cracking? We compete in 10 days and don’t want to find out the hard way that we should have ordered additional spares. Thanks!
We did testing with our robot from last year at the start of this season. We drove the robot over the 1-inch x 3-inch steel borders over 100 times. Our drivetrain was vex omnis in front and back with vex glass-filled in the middle.
I was shocked when none of the wheels showed any damage. However, the result to our robot was pretty substantial. It tore the cams through the frame (1/16" wall with vex bearing blocks), dismantled the transmissions with a couple sheared bolts, and repeatedly caused the robot to lose connection.
I wouldn’t be so worried about your wheels as the condition the rest of your robot will be in if you choose to dukes-of-hazzard it without pneumatic tires.
These wheels were the same ones that were on our robot all last year.
Thank you for the information! That’s a little disconcerting but not totally unexpected.
So were your tests running full (or at a high) speed for the 100 trials? Glad we built for the trench run. I’m sure it will only be 50% available, but at least there is a reduced chance of broken robots.
We did this once. Of course, it was the first year of our modern team and we didn’t know any better. Ended up with a bent frame eventually, not sure if it was from that particular event,.
We hit the steel border near max speed (18 fps, fast) and broke 2 rollers on our 6" VEX omni wheels. Robot still drove fine for the rest of the match, but we would definitely swap out those wheels at a competition.