This year Team 8 decided to use 4" colson wheels for our drivetrain (8 wheel WCD). After a few matches down at Ventura we noticed black gunk had begun to build up on the wheels. On closer inspection, we noticed it was fused to the wheel and had to be scraped off with a knife. Looked kind of like melted plastic.
Our bot is pretty quick and we were skidding around the field when shuttling gears, so this may have been part of the problem. We are thinking it might be the field tape melting on the wheels. Anyone else face this issue? Better way to remove it rather than scraping with a knife (which marks up the colson itself)? I’ll try to get a picture soon.
(It’s also only on the back two wheels, but our robot does tend to rock backwards)
Huh. We are running the same config, 4in (2in wide) 8wd colsons. No gunk build up or anything after rock city. And we are definitely one of the faster bots.
With a 6WD, West Coast Drive Train with 4 inch Colsons, our robot also drives on the back 4 as most of the weight is there. We are thinking of rotating the wheels and replacing them, which would mean taking the front 2 wheels and replacing the middle wheels with those and but the middle wheels up front. This would happen every so often, so like every 7-10 matches. I think it as also been suggested to use acetone to wipe off the Colsons, but someone please check my words here.