Rhino Track teams, are you considering ease of belt replacement in your design?
Just wondering if belt replacement is going to be an issue, and not knowing how the belts will hold up, got me thinking we should plan for being able to replace a belt between Matches.
In looking at the AndyMark Bumper Kit, has anyone installed this, and can the bracket be removed quickly of needed, or does the plywood and bumper need to be removed to access the fasteners?
Running a Blown Alcohol car with shift points at 10,500 rpm sometimes caused our blower belts to leave the vehicle, sometimes in spectacular fashion… So belt replacement was an issue.
Our team always builds fully-modular drive trains so that if anything fails spectacularly, we can have it entirely apart, replaced, and put back together in a short timeframe.
We have a bot with Rhino Treads this year and we didn’t change our drive train plan at all. We still have two fully-modular drive pods so that if we break a belt, it comes apart, is replaced, and goes back onto the robot with ease.
You can see the insides of one drive pod in a picture here.
Our tank system is plug and play… well theoretically. We should be able to swap out the entire tread in the queuing line (though I hope it never comes to that). Actually replacing the belt might take 1/2 hour to an hour later though.
