Just trying to get a general feel for what speed other teams perfer. Also, if your team tried multiple speeds, what did you like/not-like about certain ones.
- MK4 L1
- MK4 L2
- MK4 L3
- MK4 L4
- MK4i L1
- MK4i L2
- MK4i L3
0 voters
We started with l3 at our first event but switched to l2 afterwards. We had a couple breakers popped when driving hard and that was the main factor.
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Purchased L1’s, wanted to change to L2 or even L3 during the middle of the season, but there was no stock left.
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We ran Mk4 L2s at between 75 and 90% translational speed for our events. The plan was to work up to 100% speed, but it was fast enough for me at about 90%.
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We ran mk4 l2s at full speed, the extra speed l2 had was helpful for getting past defense and the acceleration was pretty good.
Ran L4 this season. Great for getting around defense but it destroys the blue nitrile tread (as expected). Main reason we went with it this season was because we had originally bought mk3s with the fast gearing and then bought the mk4 upgrade kits later. A new set of gears for each module would be ~$500 so we stuck with it and it worked out.
That… seems counter intuitive. L4, as the “fastest” (smallest reduction) ratio puts the least amount of torque down to the tread, and has the slowest acceleration of the four options.
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We must have gotten a bad batch of blue tread last time we bought it then. After a 1h practice session our carpet was littered with chunks of the tread. We’re switching to the black neoprene tread soon which holds up much better than blue nitrile so the excessive wear won’t be as much of an issue.
Yeah the recent batch of blue nitrile from SDS is notoriously bad. The black neoprene they have is great. Earlier blue nitrile or blue nitrile from other suppliers is significantly more durable, though as far as I can tell not quite as good as the currently available black tread.
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We ran blue nitrile exclusively this year. We found at one point that we were destroying the tread in as little as an hour, as many teams have reported.
We investigated and found that this was not due to the tread itself, gearing, or acceleration, it was due to poor angle offsets on our modules. If the module offsets are anything less than perfect, they will scrub (even when perfect they will scrub a little bit). Once the offsets are a few degrees different from ideal, you start to destroy the tread very quickly as the modules fight each other more frequently.
I highly, highly recommend that any team that is finding their tread is wearing down in less than event’s worth of time redo their module offsets. Black vs. blue will not get you from 1hr of drive time to 8hrs, there is an underlying issue that needs to be solved.
We made this suggestion to at least one other team this season and it cut their frequency of tread changes down by an order of magnitude. In our case we discovered some of our modules did not have glue/loctite on the encoder magnet, so they would drift over time. Even once this was fixed, when we would redo our offsets we occasionally still found very minor changes (a degree or two after a few weeks of events/practice), but we found that we could run the same tread for more than a full event and a week of HARD practice.
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I don’t doubt that frequent offset checks fixed the problem for blue nitrile, but I don’t think this statement is true. The black tread wore down significantly slower for us with no changes to maintenance practices, and many teams are reporting the same thing. It seems the neoprene just holds up better to scrub force.
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Except it absolutely will. We shredded a set of blue nitrile in about an hour the Saturday before champs, and have been running black neoprene the entirety of champs plus the MN state tournament plus a bit of practice without issue. Can’t even tell they’re worn other than the ball fuzz building up.
The prior blue nitrile lasted almost six months of on and off drive practice plus two events for us.
This isn’t to say you’re totally wrong— both what you’ve described and what I’ve described can be true other than the statement above.
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Since no one mentioned motors yet, is it safe to assume all responders are running Falcons? From SDS website, it seems running Falcons at L2 should be similar to running Neos at L3.
That’s not a safe assumption at all, no; and it’s a very relevant point to make.
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