I am currently working on a project that involves creating a swerve maintenance and repair manual. Have any of you made one before, and if so, I would love to trade notes about the creation of one. All the help I can get would be appreciated; I am also planning to reach out to the company too.
My team is running an MK4I swerve, but feel free to post about your swerves below. This post serves to start a discussion and collaborate on swerve repairs.
Thanks in advance for the help and will be open to sharing notes once the manual is completed.
Our team uses MK4i swerve modules, and we do three key things for maintenance:
Grease the modules at each competition (or more often)
Disassemble, clean, and reassemble the modules after each season.
Replace tread before competitions and maybe once during the event.
Additionally, we include swerve modules in our systems check. This involves running the swerve, a visual inspection of belts, and ensuring bolts on tread are tight.
This about all we did last year when we used MAXSwerve. But pinion gears failing at two comps caused us to switch to MK4n during the offseason, which has been great.
Aside from spare parts, we’ve found that after a competition or about 15 hours of drive practice, we need to take the modules apart and clean them out, degrease, and regrease them. With enough driving, little carpet particles get into it an combine with the lithuim grease to form a kin of… pulpy paste.
So we have some shop rags (the blue kind), some foam swabs to get between the gear teeth, some degreasing liquid stuff to soak parts in, and then more lithium grease to lube 'em up again. That and some smaller jewelry pliers and cutters for removing longer carpet strands that got picked up bu the wheels/gears.
We’ve seen the same sludge. We’ve been doing partial disassembly, but you are probably right and it makes sense to clean the whole thing. It was worst this year with all the cheeto dust as well.
My favorite was a piece of gaffers tape from our practice area got caught in the bevel gear and almost liquified… cleaning that off was a chore.
Great pointers. We’ll be adding them to our PM schedules.
We’ve seen 3 of 4 MK4i 3.5ID X-contact bearings in a set fail. Modules were assembled in the 2023 off season.
One bearing seized and ended up spinning in the pocket. The module itself was still functional however I’m sure over time it would’ve ruined the fit of the pocket.
No other modules have failed like that as of yet. So maybe it was assembly or PM error.
It’s usually bearings and screws. Hopefully not the giant $50 bearing. Replace them. SDS will sell the parts individually and it’s not worth banking your season on trying to clean the part.
Some light machine oil does wonders if you can wipe a thin film on.
We had all our alloy bolts/machine screws rust at Houston as well as a few more major lasercut steel parts on other parts of the bot. (light surface rust, nothing that would impact performance).
One thing we saw was that the big bearing for the angle pivot can get a lot of carpet fuzz in it. Blow it out with compressed air and the work a little grease in.
We (1699) used MK4i this past season (2024) without any issues. We assembled the modules in early fall 2023 and used them on a practice bot until we mounted them on “Stacy,” our 2024 bot. While we qualified for Worlds, we did not attend. Besides the regular 2024 season, we participated in the NE District Champs, the CT State Championship, and one off-season event in October 2024. We had zero issues with our swerve through all this use, which is mostly a testament to the SDS units. However, I would also estimate that our swerve covers, with filtered vent fans, along with our maintenance practices likely helped mitigate failures/wear. Below are some pictures and links to the swerve covers that we have also posted to GrabCAD. With these mounted on our SDS units at all times, we never have to clean any debris out of the gears. Only the two bevels bevel gears required cleaning… the ones not protected by the covers.
After each competition or extended practice sessions, we tip our robot so the belly pan is vertical and then take the wheels off and clean the bevel gears and the x-contact bearings (3.5" dia.) with a shop vac and a toothbrush. We are careful to suck debris OUT/downward out of the x-contact bearing when we do this. Following cleaning, we oil the x-contact bearing, retread the wheels if necessary and then remount them. We then tip the robot back flat and add grease to the steering and drive gears using a dental syringe. I will stress that we never have carpet or game-piece debris in our main steering and drive gears because of the efficacy of the covers and filtered-fan air that slightly pressurizes the “gear box.” Hope this helps!
Is there a recommended cleaner and recommended oil for cleaning and relubricating the bearings? We’re about to start our clean and rebuild process for our mk4i swerve wheels and would love to know what other teams have used and found success with, especially for cleaning out the gunk.
We just did this last week, our coach went to a local marina and used a parts cleaner there (not sure exactly what it was exactly) and it’s all clean now. We applied lithium grease to big bearings and just cleaned up the other ones. Let me know if you need any questions answered.
