Not to mention unstable. When I was in High School (back when the dinosaurs were roaming) one of our science teachers was moving to a different room. While he was cleaning out stuff a previous teacher left, he came upon a bottle of ether. Nobody knew how long it had been there, but the dust was pretty thick. They evacuated the building and brought in the bomb squad to remove it (kinda messed up the old lesson plan that day;) ). Apparently ether becomes more unstable with age or at least that's what they told us back then.

A bunch of us watched, (who said high school kids were smart?) but nothing exciting happened, probably just as well.

it wasn't ether but it contained ether....
smelled just like ether and was some sort of compound containing ether...

i didn't catch any warnings about flamability but i do know it had alot about ingestion and skin contact as well as eye contact.

Melting plastic, smoke, frantic cooldown
 

about those motor mounts.....well as far as heat dissipation goes, they SUCK. Plastic is a great thermal insulator...so the motors get nice and toasty after continuous operation.

A funny story about that...the monday before shipping (about 20 mins before we learned about the extension) we started testing out our robot...we ran it for about 3 batteries(dumb yes). In the past we have had custom over engineered mounts, made of about a zillion pieces...but weighing very little. Since these motor mounts were alum, we never had heat problems. For some odd reason no one thought about heat on monday, i guess we figured since there was no problem in the past there wouldn't be one in the future, well needless to say, we smoked not only the mounts but the WHOLE MOTOR FAN HOUSING, which entailed me and one of the drivers to run to the compressed air hoses and liberally spray down the entire motor and housing.
After this little incident, we designed and cut out precision heat sinks on the wire EDM, these being made of alum. They function well as heat sinks and heat pipes to the whole frame of our robot. The cannot keep up with the heat up of the robot, but when it is not moving it cools down VERY QUICKLY. An added bonus is that i can now change the drill motors out by turning a single cap screw, instead of four bolts. Also there is no motor shifting...for those of you who can see your motors when you change directions you notice that the motors spin as much as a 1/4 inch in the mountings.

Re: Melting plastic, smoke, frantic cooldown
 

I don't really understand. Do you have a picture of what you did?

unfortunatly no, most of us were too busy to take pictures (ours is the pink robot) we took a few, but no one thought about taking any pictures of actual components. Basically, it looks like a block of extruded alum, it has gear like teeth around the outside, and a hole the size of a drill motor with a cap screw on the slit on the top of the hole. you tighten the screw to secure the motor

Got it, thanks. Sounds pretty cool. (Pun intended) We bought some blue radial heatsinks for our motors and they helped with cooling by like 250%

Ugh...
 

I'm the base driver for the Pink Team this year. Let me tell you, those heatsinks kick mucho butt. But, more than that, the fact that we high centered the bot helped a ton... running on two drills isnt the best for turning in take mode :-)

-Ash