Over the past few months I have been hearing a lot about these great wheels called Colson’s. I have a few questions about them…
-Why are they so great? because I’m hearing a lot of “COLSONS ARE THE BEST” and I want to know why they are so good! These wheels sound amazing from what people have been saying!
-Which one’s are the best to use? I’ve seen a lot of flat grey tread, are they the Encore wheels or the Performa Tread, I can’t tell.
-How are team’s mounting hubs on to them? I’ve herd of just press fitting a hub into the wheels them self’s, like the ones sold on WCP. What are other effective ways to mount a hub to these guys?
-How price effective are they? cheap not cheap? Because on their site you have to get a quote on what you want to buy and I do not know what colson wheels are good for what?
Also if you have any other tips or tricks for colson’s, they would be greatly appreciated.
All you have to do for a hub is take some aluminum round bar, turn it to size (for a press fit), knurl it, drill and ream it, part it off, and broach it, and press it in. If you do it right, the hub doesn’t even need a flange on it;, just a straight cylinder through the wheel’s bore.
They’re not the absolute grippiest tire out there, but they grip rather well and wear well. They’ll last all season long even driving on pavement, parade routes, demos, etc. The zero-maintenance aspect was my reason for using them last season. I’m over having to rivet on conveyor belt tread.
Just beware if you attempt to machine the wheels themselves. They may have small air pocket voids inside from the molding process.
This is the second year FRC2168 is running Colson Performa wheels on our robot. We designed and manufactured our own hubs last year, and the second iteration of the design is what you see on the West Coast Products website. FRC2168’s 2012 robot is running the WCP hubs and bearings, we were impressed with the quality of the machining and have had no issues thus far. This robot actually has a total of 11 Colson Performa wheels on it. 8 (5"x1.5") in the drivetrain, 2 (6"x1.5") for the shooter wheels, and 1 (4"x1.5") on the bridge manipulator. So they are also really grippy against this years game piece.
These hubs are designed to fit the 1.5" wide wheels. Last year we ran 4" wheels, this year we wanted some extra ground clearance and went with the 5" option. I can tell you that I don’t intend to design a drivetrain without Colsons unless something major happens.
The WCP hub is designed for a 3/8" dead axle, and in the future WCP will most likely be offering a live axle option as well. The hubs allow you to put Colson wheels right onto a kitbot, which we believe is a great option and a really great way to evaluate the wheels for yourselves. If you want a live axle hub, its basically just “plug” with either a hex or key broach, and the OD sized for a press fit. They are a little heavier than other wheel options (pneumatic wheels are heavier though), but the cost is low, and 1 set should last you an entire season. That means no changing tread between matches.
Colson Performa wheels are available through a variety of sources, I’ve heard that a number of teams have gone to local suppliers. FRC2168 buys our wheels from Robotmarketplace.com. They are also available from McMaster and you’ll get them faster but the price is not as good.
The performance of the wheels has been great. The grip is approximately the same as roughtop on carpet, but on other surfaces the Colsons have the advantage (like the bridges this year). Some teams have cut tread grooves into the surface of the wheels are report an increase in traction, however we have never seen a need for more traction (at least not yet).
Colson Performa wheels have been the wheel of choice in Battlebots for as long as I can remember. Teams such as 190, 228, 2168, 1771, 11, 125 have been using Colson wheels successfully for many years. More are more teams are looking at using them, and we welcome them to the club.
How is the traction on the key and on the carpet with these wheel versus a standard AM performance wheel with rough top conveyor belting?
We have been having an issue of wheel slip on the key when we start to drive to the bridge, and I am wondering if these would provide better or worse traction and what the tradeoffs would be.
Adam,
In our experience the Colsons out perform the roughtop conveyor on smooth surfaces including the key and the bridge. On the carpet they seem to be fairly equal. I strongly suggest picking up some for testing.
We are using Colson wheels for our two center wheels (one is dropped, one is raised). We found that the traction on polycarbonate and HDPE is much better than Roughtop, and quickly decided to use them over IFI wheels for the dropped wheel.
We too have found that the grip the Colons have on the PC and HDPE portions of the field (bridge and key) to be awesome. We have known about Colson’s performance characteristics on these types of surfaces for several years, which is what made using them this year a no brainer.
Cutting grooves into the wheels also has shown an increase in traction, to the point where I believe our Colsons will “out grip” any standard roughtop/wedgetop wheel in the same width (1.5").
Perhaps we should have kept HOT in the dark about this matter… :rolleyes:
I’m also wondering about this, because the wheels my team has experience with are either 8" pneumatics from Granger, KOP grey tread wheels, mecanums, or the lunacy wheels. I’m not sure I could convince the team to switch to Colsons unless I could convey there is an absolute advantage to their use over other wheels, including fabrication of our own wheels.
Everything is an engineering trade off in some way, wheel selection is no different. “Absolute Advantage” is subjective.
Pros that we’ve found for the Colson Performa wheels:
Low Cost
Never change tread
Approximately match Roughtop on Carpet (un-grooved)
Outperform on other surfaces (Plexi, HDPE, diamond plate)
Some Shock Absorbing capability
They “warm up” during a match (gearheads may find this interesting)
COTS dead axle hubs available (this was previously the barrier to entry for most teams)
You can get CAD Models from the Colson Website. You may have to download the entire caster then save just the wheels, this is typically what we have done. I do have a model for the 4"x1.5" on my home computer if needed.
Team 228’s 2010 Swerve Used ‘Cut’ Colsons, Team 148’s 2008 swerve used Colsons, Along with 3928 (2012) and Team 40 (2011) as already mentioned.
In a simple pushing test in the pre-season (I sat on carpet, had the drive push against my feet for ~15 seconds) I found that the wheel temperature got to ~100-105* F depending on which drive wheel it was (30* increase from room temperature of ~70*). There was a noticeable improvement in performance immediately following this test, almost as if the drive had more ‘bite’ on the carpet.
No COTS source yet. I believe RC will be offering them in the future.
2415 has used colsons for the past 2 years as well. Last year we swapped to them after using custom treaded wheels and the increase in performance was noticeable. This year we strayed to pneumatic wheels to deal with the bump and were incredibly disappointed with the performance. We have just finished swapping to colsons for a weight savings of 2.5lbs and again the increase in performance is night and day. We will not be using any other wheels in the future.
All my experience has been with the standard KOP wheels, as well as the andy mark Plaction wheels with both rough and wedge top. I’ve always found the wedge top to out preform on HDPE and other non carpeted materials but the rough top to maintain traction better on carpet. It seems to be relatively widely noticed that the Colson wheels out preform the rough top on HDPE and has similar performance on carpet but has anyone compared them to the wedge top?