[fox46]

What if they sell that cup of coffee to you at a drive through? They are endorsing driving with said cup of coffee. If the coffee is indeed hot enough to cause second degree burns and they endorse driving with it - by all means they can get sued - even despite the "Caution Contents Hot" on the side of the cup. - That isnt the best analogy. We all know that many establishments have been quite successfully sued over this.

Yes they have the disclaimer not to use them with any more than 35lb-ft but obviously this spec is overrated. When using the RS395 motors on the 326:1 gearbox, at stall the combination produces ~28lb-ft of torque which is less than the rated loading of the gearbox. I don't know how you can claim a team is overloading a 326:1 with an RS395.

In our team's case, we have a 5.4:1 reduction after the P60 on our arm. At it's maximum extension in the horizontal plane, it reaches about 5 feet. Given this spec, the arm should have a capacity of 37.8 lbs. Since the whole arm itself weighs 15 lbs the P60 should reliably tolerate upwards of 20lbs of force at the end of the arm. This doesn't even consider the gas shock we have to assist it. I don't know but I doubt any of the drivers have been practicing scoring steel belted radials.

Yes the impulse loading on the arm will indeed approach this limit of 35 lb-ft but if BB was prudent they would have allowed at least a factor of safety of 2. Alas, declaring that these P60s are only good to ~17 lb-ft would definitely deter many teams from buying them. I know we would have gone with something else if this was the case. Of course this would severly impact their sales to the FIRST community so it seems they either chose to favor their bottom line rather than the reliability of their product or they have over estimated the strength of their product.