So we got qualified to go compete at the VEX World Championships and we are planning on doing a week rebuild during our Spring break. Currently we have a 4in hs drop center drive. A 5:1, 6 motor single arm lift with a nonparallel linkage that is not powered and is only used for rubber bands, and a pneumatic hybrid claw . For our rebuild our claw and lift will be same design but we are debating about our drive. As stated before our drive is a 4in drop center but we are having traction issues with heavy loads. If there is anyway to fix this, we will probably not change our drive. However, we read on the forums that a standard tank drive is much better for traction. because of this our other 2 options of our base would be a 4in high speed or 3.25in high speed half drop center. A half drop center is where the front and back wheel are the same but it can tilt forward like a drop center so that the back wheel is fully off the ground and it doesn’t burn out. What are benefits of each drive and what would you recommend for us? And do any of these options burn out very easily? Thanks in advance
Our club has one of each: one standard tank drive, one hybrid thing, and a drop center. The standard tank drive is 3.25" on turbos, which is almost exactly the same as 4" on a 2:1 gear ratio, which the other two drives ran. Our drop center and half drop center both ran into pretty severe traction issues. I have driven both the drop center robot and the tank drive, and the cycle times on the tank drive were noticeably faster because of the extra traction. We’ve experimented a lot with how to improve traction with a drop center but failed in the end, and we are moving to a standard tank drive. However there seems to have been teams with success using a drop center, like 62 and 127C.
so the teams who have the standard 3.25 turbo is running 4 motors? And when u mean by tank do you mean even if it is a heavy load, the base is still flat? Do you not run into any burn out issues on your drive?
They burned out at states but that was because they had some pretty terrible build quality. Since then we’ve rebuilt it and it hasn’t burned out. All of these drives used 4 motors.