My team bought 4 MaxSwerve modules at the beginning of the year, and one out of the four wheels keeps shaving. A couple weeks ago, the module was covered in grey shavings, and we took it apart but couldn’t find where the issue was, so we decided to leave it. I checked back today after a lot of driver practice, and it looks like this now 
Has anyone else had this problem? Or know how to fix it? It’s not the treads coming off, just being grinded down somehow.
Are your wheels dragging? Spinning? This would be indicative of a software issue. Did you use the REV swerve template or something else? If REV, did you update after they added the SlewRateLimiter a week or two ago?
That level of wear seems excessive, but wheel tread is considered a consumable.
We’ve probably driven our modules for maybe 3-5 hours (not exactly sure because we were tuning code while we were doing it) and we also have 3 wheels looking basically exactly like that. One of the wheels seem to have significantly less wear, could be something weird with how it was assembled (I’m thinking it is somehow elevated above the others).
Is the tread for those wheels sold separately though? Aren’t they just molded to the wheel?
Curious what this looks like with the slew rate limiting if anyone has an example after 3-5 hours.
New wheels with tread on them are 5$ per wheel
Wow impressive price point. Still curious how fast they wear with the slew rate limiting compared to rivet on/screw on tread.
OP what do the other 3 look like? Is the weight of your bot evenly distributed?
This may be the million dollar question.
Based on the OP, it sounds like this wheel is wearing more aggressively than the others - with no obvious mechanical issues.
As you alluded to - what’s the weight distribution? Is it very heavy in the opposing corner?
Is there anything that causes the frame to flex dynamically - or is the frame “Bent”. An underloaded wheel would wear like this - as it may “Slip” more often than not, which would point to either a really offset center of mass (one wheel is strange though) or a really bent frame - which is not unheard of.
Regarding the wear / life of these wheels - after some quick driving in our last meeting, I was surprised at the amount of heat that could be felt in the wheel’s tread after 1-1.5 minutes of driving at ~75% Floor Speed (for us, about 10fps on 13-14). Some of this could just come down to - 300W of Power (Welcome to the Future) being sent through a 3" Diameter, 1" Wide Wheel.
I’m fairly sure that the MAXSwerve wheels wear out faster because they are 3" wheels instead of 4" wheels. However, It’s much easier to replace these wheels then replace aluminum wheel tread.
Would be fun to do tire rotations every few matches, are y’all rocking with the rearward cross, forward cross, or X pattern 
Posting a pic of the 4in VersaDT wheels on some L1 MK2 SDS modules after 3 hours of drive time for reference
Does anyone know the rough amount of time black neoprene tread on SDS modules lasts for? I don’t remember seeing any exact numbers, but it seems that the rubber material might be worse than the tread possibly?
Just the monthly(?) reminder that not all black neoprene roughtop is created equal and sourcing matters in some cases.
There’s a lot of truth to this - smaller diameter wheel will use “More Tread” per unit “Real Distance” (so physical distance traveled) since it rotates more. Beyond that, it’s been shown that smaller diameter wheels have higher contact pressure with carpet (Diametrically smaller wheel is “less flat”) which will typically lead to some fun interactions at the micro level.
That said, asymmetric wheel wear is almost always due to a Wheel being Over or Under loaded (Overloaded increases scrub, Underloaded allows for Wheel Spin) - Root causes of this get a bit more fun - could be bad CoM placement, could be a bent/flexible frame, could be running the same cycle on a (very) not flat floor enough times will cause the issue.
Ooh! Two of the major things teams doing swerve for the very first time during build are likely to discover the importance of!
(In all seriousness, if this is your first swervebot these two things are very important. You will want to check your COM and if your frame is bent/ overly flexible. This is especially true with all the hard hits that are bound to happen this year)
