I’m going to mention the colson option for the future, which seems much better for this application, but for this year we just have this year’s swerve bot, a practice swerve bot (chassis only), and a couple past year KOP chassis bots. We’ve always run the latter in the parade with no problem, but I’m concerned about the black neoprene failing. Thanks.
During the parade, do you do much swerving?
50 passes up and down a field is 1 mile.
2 Likes
Be gentle with the throttle 
Yeah, concrete is tough on those little nubblies… Really, its tough on all the wheels, but solid ones have waaaay more margin for error.
On pavement? I’d never run any wheels other than pneumatics to be honest. Colsons you can do but I’d consider them destroyed after. It’s not the tread I’d be worried about - that’s cheap - but it’s gonna put some marks in your aluminum wheels.
Maybe your roads are better than upstate NY parking lots though.
8 Likes
This is also how you turn crowned colsons into ground colsons. Nifty little hack.
7 Likes
If you have time I’d print some tpu tread like this. They didn’t grab carpet good but held up good on some short pavement driving, not real aggressive driving bit some mild swerving back and forth. I’m positive way better than the conveyor tread
7 Likes
last time i swerved on concrete it messed up the bolt heads, made it very difficult to get the tread off. if you’re not hitting any bumps and only going in a straight line it’s probably fine, but that feels unrealistic.
if it were me i would just go for it and fix it later, but some other suggestions in this thread would probably be better ideas.
4 Likes
That looks cool might want to tri it so we could do a little swerving at events. Do you have a link to that model?
1 Like
I’ll see if it’s in the team drive
1 Like
This is definitely what I’d be most worried about. We ran swerve on concrete for a demo for some elementary schoolers and the bolt heads were completely destroyed. Took quite a while to change the tread the next time. Swerve on concrete isn’t out of the question, but keep that in mind
This was our experience as well, running part-time for an hour at a demonstration in the concourse at the local AAA baseball stadium. We realized that the bolt heads were actually marking up the concrete pretty badly so we stopped. Haven’t had time to change out stuff but the bolt heads look really bad and I think it may be challenging,.
We ran our T-shirt cannon in our homecoming parade and about an hour outside on a concrete basketball court. In the parade we used blue nitrile and it FUSED ITSELF to the SDS wheels and flattened the bolt heads and was near impossible to get off. We then used our spare black neoprene for driving it on the basketball court and it held up… so I’d say yes if you be careful with the throttle it should hold up, but the problem is with the bolt heads flattening…
We ran the blue nitrile rhino tracks during a parade a little bit ago and they held up fine, a they had also been through a full day of demo outside a few days before and still were fine if not coated in grass.
FRC bots on concrete is in our experience generally not a good idea - our swerve wheel bolt heads ended up pretty messed up after some summer outreach events on concrete and the tread didn’t last long either.
This was after a couple of hours of demo at a park, partially on a paved path, partially in the grass, with a tank drive. Not the best choice of wheels!
After this, I try to get us to use pneumatic tires if we’re doing anything on a rough surface like that!
1 Like
Don’t do it.
1 Like
+1 the tread might last but your issue will be the bolts that fasten the tread to the wheel. We ran our MK4s on asphalt in a parking lot last year. It was a lot less driving than a parade and we had very difficult time getting the bolts out with heads deforming.
Run Colsons if you can and go easy on the controls.
Do you have a file for the TPU tread you can share?
It wasn’t on our team Drive but I’ll get a hold of the mentor that printed it and see if he can get it to you.
2 Likes
Me too please!