We flogged out the square hole in the 4" grip wheel centre (too much driving!)
We removed the rubber tyre and placed the wheel in a pot of hot tap water, thinking that this might help soften the plastic a bit so we could remove and replace the plastic wheel centre more easily.
A wheel in a pot of water looked amusing, so a photo was taken and posted on Bots N Stuff (caused much speculation and fun )
We see a post suggesting that we did something illegal by boiling wheels to gain a competitive advantage??? (caused great hilarity )
My reason for posting this is that I would feel really bad if any teams gave the idea of boiling their wheels some credence, and ended up wrecking their wheels by doing so. If you try it, I hope the soup tastes good, because the odds of the rubber surviving this treatment may not be good.
What sort of pasta would you recommend I make for a pot-luck dinner? Old-fashioned 3-wire Maccheroncini, or the more modern 2-wire Bucatini? I have a lot of ground motor gears laying around, and I’d to sprinkle them on some pasta but I’m not certain which type would complement the gears best. Thanks!
I look forward to Karthik’s response on the Boiled Wheels Q&A post. I looked through the rules, and I’m not entirely certain that boiling wheels is illegal. It says you cannot melt or weld VEX parts, but it does say that heating VEX parts is legal.
Yes, Lucas told me you thought this sandwich had too many trappings with it and left a bad taste in your mouth. At least it wasn’t a club sandwich, as these can leave some serious dents in your robot.
@ Vex Raptors. Great idea, and actually sounds much like our parts box looks, but sorry I cannot help. My Italian cooking is a recipe for disaster.
No boiling required. Just chisel away at the inside rim (the part that sticks out in the middle), and then chisel away at the plastic on the inside of the axle hole. You should get 4 plastic tabs, one for each side of the square. Now you have a bigger square hole in the wheel. File it a bit (yes, find a file - chiseling here is a BAD idea), and then you can add a metal insert on either side. That’s what we’ve been doing for our old 4" omni wheels.
Yep, there are many ways to remove the inserts easily. We just thought this would be an easy way that wouldn’t risk damaging the wheel at all. To be honest it wasn’t super effective anyway, but the picture was a good laugh :).
Guess I will be the 1st one to confess that I almost got my boys to try boiling the wheel… I told them it should be something like doing a hard-boiled egg…
On hindsight… that was really stupid of me… :o
Maybe we have just been lucky, but we have found that quite a lot of the wheels (however some are stubborn) you can just pull the inserts our, with a pair of pliers I think we used.
There was one particularly stubborn wheel… which we got the drill out for xD that was a fun 5 minutes.
If anyone is interested, we did this so that we could then replace the plastic inserts with metal ones (the ones that go in the HS gears work nicely) for less backlash and slop. However, after many hours of use the plastic of the wheel around the insert then starts to wear a bit, and there are better ways to reduce the backlash I have found.
)
