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Unread 01-03-2016, 11:38
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Thaddeus Hughes
FRC #4213 (MetalCow Robotics)
Team Role: College Student
 
Join Date: Jan 2016
Rookie Year: 2012
Location: Shirley, IL
Posts: 72
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Re: Bad MiniCIMs... failing to consistently start?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto View Post
This is likely your issue. I would not recommend placing wheels with axial or radial loads directly on the motor output shaft via an adapter. The motor output shaft is not designed to handle these sorts of loads. You should really be running a simple belt, gear or chain system to a separate shaft that has your shooter wheel on it and is well supported by the proper bearings/bushings.

I am guessing your set up is slowly but surely causing your motors to fail. I agree with others that brushes seem to be at least part of the failure mode.

Pictures would help too.

Best of luck!

-Mike
I agree that that should be the setup, but it's pretty hard to turn back now; team picked a packaging that makes that difficult.

These motors were ran with adapters that caused lots of noise, originally, so I'd imagine that's what really caused them to fail, since we were noticing similar behavior but never really bothered to investigate. I think swapping to the new hex adapters (which reduce noise to only the sound of air flowing) will vastly improve motor life, since they'll be taking less radial loads.

I will post pics of the commutators and such when I get back to the shop today, or whenever they take apart the motors again.

Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankJ View Post
As other have posted, it sounds like an issue with the brushes. When the bag motors first came out they had this issue. Maybe you have an old one?

Thread on the subject with fix
These are MiniCIMs, not BAGs, but I'll take a look to see if we can save the old MiniCIMs.