2003 Drill Motors Good or Bad?
 

Was the extra power provided by the new drill motors worth the trouble of all of the repairs and replacements needed this year or was this a bad move by FIRST?

We definitely had some problems :(

They DESOLDERED themselves, for heaven's sake...

Re: 2003 Drill Motors Good or Bad?
 

What repairs? We used both drill motors to drive our robot, and did not have to swap them out once. They lasted from the beginning of the AZ regional to the end of Nationals. I think most teams ran into problems because they did not keep the axle going into the drill motor load free :rolleyes:

drills not terrible
 

the new drills weren't terrible. we had a few problems with the brushes, but overall they performed well. i will say though that i don't think it's wise to have one set of motors that are so much more powerful than the others. how about a set of four? or even six? we need more of the same types of motors......changing motors also helps to level the playing field amongst rookies and vets. new motors means new experiences for everyone.

I agree with WakeZero, I believe we used the same motors all thoughout the build-season right up through the end of our second regional. We probably would have kept them for Nats if we could have found a way to go.
The Housings that were supplied by FIRST were nice, we won't use them again but it sure would have been cool to have them our Rookie year. I think there was a good selection of motors this year & many teams put them to good use.

No most teams had problems because they followed the rules that First gave us and ended up destroying the motors.:rolleyes:
Yeah our motors are really holding out really well after we had to send out replacements because I thought it was a good idea to get every little detail done on that robot since we were ahead. Bad idea since First changed the rules a week later.

What rule?

The motors were just fine.

The motor mounts were crap...we had so much torque going through our drive that we would actually end up spinning the drill motors in their mounts until the brushes shattered and were spit out. Eventually we made an aluminum cross-support to hold the motor in place and we haven't had any problems since.

Are you sure you assembled the drill and transmission correctly. Look inside the drill transmissions and look at the face. There is two ways they can mesh. One way is with those semi circles and the other way is with the actual circles. If you use the semi circles eventually the motors will torque a little bit and move a bit. If you use the cicrular holes the drill motors will stay put.The rule that said you had to switch out the smaller wires on the motors for larger ones.

Honestly I'm not exactly sure...I was control system guy. The above represents my best understanding of what happened to our drill motors.

I'm not too sure which way we put them in (I'm assuming we tried both...), but I'm happy that we fixed it ;)

the drills were pretty good. the clips fell out once, but that was fixed by few zipties. our team also broke a few drive train pins, because of all the torque. Now, those were annoying to fix.

We had no new problems with these drill motors. Like every year, it seems the tabs are to small for 10 gauge wire. As for the motor mounts, even after over torquing one of the bolts and cracking one of the mounts, they never failed during competition. I like the new motors and transmissions and welcome the additional power. I say give me four next year.

We had no problems except that the clutch kept shifting but a few cable ties fixed that.

The new motors and gearboxes are great!!!

After the first week and a half we found out that the FIRST motor mounts were worthless for us. We broke them.... They also do not act as heat sinks

We are lucky because we encountered the problems early in the game and found simple ways to fix the problems.

I think the main reason why the wires became unsoldered is because teams used the plastic mounts which do not disperse the heat.

We changed out 1 motor and 1 gearbox on the left side of our bot during nationals only because our chain got bound up.

(we ran the same gearboxes and motors during testing, 3 regionals and the practice rounds of Nationals)

OUR DRILLS WERE GREAT!
 

They survived through 19 matches in Phoenix and 15 matches in LA. The wire thing was not a rule, just a suggestion. We replaced the stock wires with finely stranded 8 guage. We had the motors and trannies in the mount provided in the kit. Additionally, the chiaphua was geared to the same shaft the drill was spinning. We had no problems whatsoever during use. We did not modify the trannies or mounts in any way. The shifter stayed in place and the clutches never slipped and the coupler never backed off

YAY for FIRST for providing an excellent kit.

The one problem we did have is that we cracked the thin part of the black plastic endbell of one of the motors during soldering the new wires on. A little 5 minute epoxy and it was stronger than the day it was new.

*We did not use the helical gearboxes.

The drill motor assembly worked great for our robot. After our regional we had to replace both of the drill motors. But that was because in our final regional match, we got on top of another robot and their van door motor managed to get lodged between our two motors. The broke a set of the FIRST mounts and mauled the drill motors. But they worked perfectly other than that and never got hot and unsoldered, I love muffin fans.

Hello,

Most of the problems sound like they are coming from the transmissions, not the motors. I love the whole setup, but if they provide us with four of everything my job as the gearbox man will be removed!

I like the motors but they do have their problems.
The brush assy is designed to be inside a housing not in the open so it does not have any strain relief or protection. An enclosure or tywrap fixed that.
The quality control on the soldering of the wires was pretty bad. In some cases, the connection heated due to the bad soldering and eventually let the wires fall off. Better soldering techniques at the factory would cure that. The factory I would guess is already aware of this problem in the number of warranty repairs due to motor failure the drills are having.
If the motor was used with the supplied transmission then there was enough input air flow but if you used the FIRST mount, it blocked some of the fan output. Those teams that used this transmission/motor/supplied gearing were usually OK if they didn't try to couple to large diameter drive wheels and kept all the shafts in alignment. Friction induced by side loading, lack of sufficient bearings, shaft misalignment, too large a drive wheel and failure to remove the locking rollers all contributed to a high rate of failure caused by overcurrent heating.
In other words, "Know thy enemy". The new motor is a welcome addition.

The motors work great! The transmission is junk, and the mounts didn't work well at all, but the motors worked perfectly!

We loved the new drill motors this year. Though, it would have been nice if they were easier to mount - like the CIMs. We made a single stage planetary gearbox that matched the drill motors to the CIM's no-load speed and copied the CIM's mounting holes. This let us use the same spur gearboxes for our drills that we used for our CIMs (we used four motors to drive six wheels - ten wheels if you count dualies individually).

Here's an exploded view of the planetary stage and motor housing. The housing also has a cutout and mounting holes for a muffin fan, which is not shown.

-Joel

I want to second both Al's and Joel's comments.

If you paid attention to the details (shaft alignment, cooling, protecting the fragile brushes with a shroud, using good soldering technique if you had to repair the wires), then the drill motors were outstanding.

in my opinion the new bosch were more of a pain in the butt then last years. my tea used the bosch last year and didnt have a single problem w/ them all season , but the new ones are weaker and very easy to break. the bosch at the top of our lifting arm broke 3 times till we made a few adjustments.


but i dont think the extra power was worth the trouble the gear box cant take as much stress and the nose of the assembly can came WAY too easily:]

in my opinion the new bosch were more of a pain in the butt then last years



Take it to the years when we got the old Bosch motors.....

Remember all the troubles we all had with them????

I believe it originally said in the rules that you must!!! change the wires in the drill transmissions.

Our team liked the new motors...we coupled a CIM motor with a drill motor and geared the two through a drill transmission. The transmissions did cause a slight problem, however, because there were not a lot of good places to hold them...overall, the power boost was appreciated!

Our drill motors worked good. We didn't have to change them after competing in a whole regional. They probably would have been fine if we went to nats too.

We did need to make a keyway in the shaft though, because otherwise, our little set screws didn't do squat. Our gears on our axles that drove the chains we used kept slipping. But once we made a keyway in our shaft, it was fine.

I was happy with the new drill motors since we were pretty much a rookie team. We only had like 3 people on the team that competed last year, and their robot last year didn't work.

New motors do level the playing field, and I am glad FIRST introduced these motors.

Drill motor source
 

I'm planning a short summer work session and would like to work with the drill motors. Anybody have source information handy? I need to process a purchase order ASAP. I found a Bosch website but didn't have the model number et cetera handy.
Thanks,

APS

Toltechs
#499
San Antonio, Texas

You should be able to look through the supplier information in the 2003 manual and find the drill motor supplier. I believe it is S&K Tools (or something close).

I pulled this from another thread:

There are also S-B locations here:

Farmington Hills, MI: 248-476-7788
somewhere, CA: 714-779-4900

Toward the end of this year's season, I bought some motors from the California location, since the other two were out of stock.

Andy B.

I think that overall we liked the new motors. They are very finicky in how you mount them and how you handle the wiring.

Thanks to the FIRST community here, I was able to warn our rookies to BE CAREFUL when handling them and give advance notice of some of the potential problems.

I think that if we see them again next year, they will be no big deal. The weaknesses are known and fixes for them are widely available, at least to CD readers.

Every time you change something major like the drive motors there will be a bit of a learning curve. It will take a year or two for people to get the bugs worked out. I think these have been pretty well wrung out now.

That said, I do wish the brush assemblies were a little more rugged. Other than that I have no complaints.

BTW we disassembled the tranny, removed the clutch and installed our own output shaft, before reassembling them. That may have reduced some of our problems.

Drill motors
 

We liked them although we did encounter problems.
1. the mounts didn't keep the entire assembly together from end-to-end as the drill handles do (clutch causes separation)
2. the mounts didn't keep the last output section from spinning and breaking the bayonet mount connection between gearbox sections.

We used them with the FIRST gearbox and misalignment coupling. We found these were helpful and they did not break.

drill motors
 

Per post #32.
Most teams did not modify the output section & clutch because this was explictly forbidden by the rules.

Re: drill motors
 

Not true.

Motors cannot be modified. However, the Bosch gearbox can surely be modified (see section 2.4 in "the Robot" and rule M15)

The F-P, Bosch and globe motor gearboxes are not considered an "integral part" of the motor, and therefore can be altered modified or removed entirely from the motor.

Andy B.

Re: drill motors
 

Thank's Andy,

I was checking my post in reply when I saw your response. I like your's better than what I wrote. Mostly because you cited the rules in question and I don't have the rule book handy. Besides, I was way too wordy.

Chris

I personally loved the new drill motors. They had plenty of power and we never once had a problem with over-heating. THough we did have to change out like 6 or 7 of the mounts and trashed about 6 couplers. We also had a problem with the wires becoming disconected from the brushes with a small tug of the wire but beside those few thing the motors were excelent. I say give 4 or 6 in the kit next year. I also saw one team who overheated the motors and as a resault the plastic casing the holds the brushes in melted. But we helped them fix it with zip ties. The mounts were a different story though. Get rid of them they are crap. Keep the gear boxes though they were good

I could have sworn I already posted in here...

I loved the new drills. They worked great for us. Most of the trouble seems to have come from teams using all the supplied stuff. We did the same thing we did last year, and dint have a single problem with them until the brushes fell out after around 20 matches.

Cory

Why am I thinking that our team is the only team that did not have horrendous problems with this years drill motors and kit that FIRST gave us?

Adam,

Would you mind telling me how you used them on your robot, so that I can figure out what you did right and make improvements to my teams robot next year. THanx

Hehe We just used them like they were supposed to in the kit. Almost exactly like it though and we never destroyed a drill motor. Now that I remeber correctly we did have one problem with a drill but that was my fault and it was easily fixed. I installed the drill motor wrong.
Yowser. Thats what we encountered. It is not the mounts. It is the drills. They are not installed correctly. If installed correctly you should experience no problems in using those mounts.

What's with everyone wanting more drill motors? Okay, they're the best motor, but think about it...

If we were given 4 drills, that would mean 2 horsepower robots. If you added the cippies, 2.75 horses. That is insane power. Rookie teams who don't have the experiance to join multiple motors will be left in the dust. FIRST wants to put limits on teams with crazy tech skills so they don't slaughter other teams. Last year if you used the drills, chippies, and FP motors, you only got about 2 HP. Its not that much an advantage for all the extra weight and hard work you need to make it work. Notice that you can't use titanium or beryllium? That's so rich teams don't make a super-light, indestructible robot. FIRST tries to make it fair to all teams, so even a rookie team still has a chance to win.

Also, adding motors here requires motors to dissapear somewhere else. A robot isn't only drive train. Some teams just have a simple drive train, and an intricate object manipulator system. What motor would you sacrifice? Many teams never use the FP motors, but what about teams that do? How would you make crazy 6 motor drive trains be hard to make? Technocats did it with 3 different types of motors. If we get 2 more drills, so many more teams are going to do the same, but with less effort. And in the end, the Technocats will just make something even better, and the rookie teams will suffer. Not saying that all rookie teams are technologically incoherent, just look at Harker (team 1072).

Just because a team is a rookie doesn't mean they can't have a multi-motor drivetrain. They can actually be made quite simply. And if you put your mind to it, anything can be made possible. Not to mention there is the immense support from those on here, like me.

Teams want more drill motors because they are very easy to mount compared to the Atwoods, they have a shaft that can easily be coupled to another shaft with gears/sprockets on it, and they can be shifted with fairly little fabrication of other parts.

If I remember correctly, Beryllium is radioactive, which would have nothing to do with making a lighter stronger robot, but with health hazards. I dont know why you would want to use Beryllium anyways.

Cory

That's not the point. FIRST wants to give you a challenge, not a walk in the park. And if I remember correctly, beryllium can be used to make extremely strong and light alloys of aluminum, at a relatively small cost compared to making other alloys. And it isn't radioactive.

So that's why they made Beryllium illegal... I'd been wondering why anyone would want to use it. It makes sense, I suppose.

I'll give you the shifting but I find the other two points rather untrue. The Chia can be mounted to a 3x3 angle (or other vertical member or plate) with two 10-24 machine screws and 3/4 clearance hole for the projection in the center of the faceplate of the motor. As for adaptation, with the provided couplers the Chia was just as easy to adapt this year as the drill (2002 was hard though).

A couple more points in favor of the drill and gearbox:
It can often be used with only a single stage reduction (using the Bosch gearbox). The Chia requires a lot more reduction since it doesn't have a gearbox already. Another thing is, this year's drills were more powerful than the Chias in terms of wattage.