[fox46]

How much inertia does the arm have? how much load is on the transmission when you change arm travel direction?

This is exactly why we are having issues but that comes back to the marketing of a gearbox for a motor which it can't handle. The load on the motor is almost nothing but the speed at which they start and stop is what is wearing them out. We have the programmers working on a ramp function / soft start function for them which should help.

This is still a highschool competition and these machines are being built by highschool students, not engineers.... or at least thats how it should be. When we got our gearboxes, they were given to a couple of students who were told to disassemble these, figure out how they work, then reassemble them with grease. Of course they aren't going to be able to identifty the weaknesses in a design- they are just beginning to learn this stuff. I just would have preferred they learn about it in a different way in this case.