[Michael Hill]

As for concerns of the motor controllers themselves, I think the big worry for some of the older motor controllers (Jags and victors 883-888s) would have been the TO-220 fets and the through-hole capacitor kind of flapping around in a high vibration environment. The jag took care of this (or at least helped) with a plastic ring that surrounded all the fets and the capacitor. It probably didn't eliminate the problem, but probably reduced the likelihood of failure to a good degree. The real worry in that situation are the solder joints becoming fatigued and fracturing (much like the paperclip analogy above). As far as the Talons, Victor SP and other motor controllers are concerned, I haven't taken any of them apart, but from my understanding, the fets are all surface mount and the capacitor is laid over on its side. Vibrations in surface mount components are less of an issue because there's no large weight and associated moment arm associated. The bent-over electrolytic capacitor is only slightly troubling, especially if some kind of silastic compound is used to keep it in place. It's not really going to "flap around" much in its enclosure. But if you look at the application of the capacitor (a power filter capacitor), it takes out some of the transients from the input power prior to the power converter, so taking it out of the circuit may not cause the unit to fail catastrophically (what will probably happen are intermittent power cycling when the power is unclean that are a pain to diagnose). Just my thought, I could be wrong, but I'd really like to see a motor controller designer chime in.