My team is using 4" grey Andymark Stealth Wheels for our hooded shooter this year, and after a very short amount of practice, they became completely yellow from the ball’s residue. We have 2" of compression on the ball. We’re worried about how this is affecting our shot and we’d like to know how other teams are addressing this problem. I can’t provide pictures at the moment, but I will if anyone wants a reference.
Yeah this is fairly normal… We are using 4" Colson wheels and we experiencing a lot of power cell “zesting” on our shooter wheels also. I guess one way to reduce this would be to use less compression in your shooter but that would definitely affect your ability to shoot.
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Check out this topic.
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I would make sure to clean them. In 2016 and 2017, we would use a knife and essentially take a thin layer of the rubber off, or atleast removing the coating. In 2018 our intake would build up residue from the crates so we used “GreengineerZ High Quality Wherl Cleaner” aka Brake Clean with a label slapped on it. I don’t recommend using brake clean at events, it had a very strong smell. Also as a warning, it does brake down your wheels over time. We used it on compliant wheels to clean them, and it made them pretty sticky, but it got to the point we had to clean them more often and it just made sense to just get new wheels after awhile.
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Have any teams tried acetone? We have the same problem and that was what we thought we would do, I was reading up that other teams just cut a small layer off the wheel but that may get sketchy. We also thought of using Emory cloth to rough it up which would work its just not as consistent. I see a common theme when reading the threads of this problem that theirs no clear cut solution. If our team comes up with anything ill comment here but until then that’s all we got.
A can of dust-off seems to work fine for removing the lemon zest off of most things.
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Acetone worked well for us on the green compliant wheels in 2018, but we haven’t felt the need to clean anything off those year so far besides compressed air to blow off our camera lens
While we want our rollers and wheels to be zest free, we actually found that for surfaces we want to be slick (like the hood of our shooter, and other polycarb surfaces in the guts of our robot), ball dust is more effective than any other teflon tape, and it’s the only particle based lubricant we are legally allowed to use. So we’re making sure to keep it in certain places.
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