Molon Motor Legality
 

I'm pretty sure the Molon chm-2435-1 is not legal, but I want to be sure. Could an expert help?

Re: Molon Motor Legality
 

[R48] attached. The intent of the rule is to list the only permissible motors and actuators. The way it's worded, it could be interpreted to mean it's a subset of the list of permissible motors and actuators. But that's not the intended meaning.

Re: Molon Motor Legality
 

And just in case you want to press your luck and argue that wording at the competition, the manual instructs you to "when reading these rules, please use technical common sense (engineering thinking) rather than ‘lawyering’ the interpretation and splitting hairs over the precise wording in an attempt to find loopholes." (4.1 Robot Rules)

Re: Molon Motor Legality
 

The motor included in that complete assembly is not legal.

However, if you want to use the gearbox and turntable, you could remove the Mabuchi motor from the assembly and substitute a legal motor and then be able to use the rest of the assembly.

I don't have one of the "Molon chm-2435-1" assemblies to be sure, but it looks like you could remove the Mabuchi motor from the gearbox and replace it with the BaneBots M3-RS395-12 motor and have a legal assembly. In order to do so, you would need to remove the pinion gear from the supplied Mabuchi motor (if it is possible to do so) and instead put it onto the BaneBots M3-RS395-12 shaft.

This approach of taking an existing COTS assembly, removing the original motor from it, and replacing it with a FIRST-legal motor, is a common approach used by FRC teams.

Re: Molon Motor Legality
 

This of course ignores the fact that the rules get constantly lawyered back at us...