[Joe Johnson]

Concerning homebrew hardening.

I was very intriged by the homebrew hardening results reported by RaMoore. I was hopeful that the mat'l (still unknown -- I don't have access to a material lab -- will someone out there who does take the initiative and get us the alloy data for the carrier and the output shaft) had enough carbon in it to allow us to harden it relatively easily.

So... ...I headed up to my old huants, Pontiac Central -- home of the Chief Delphi FRC team, to do some homebrew hardening of my own.

I used a MAPP torch (you can buy them at you local hardware store, essentially they work just like propane only few hundred degrees hotter) and oil quench. I got the parts glowing red and quenched them in oil.

There was a lot of smoke and all that. The parts looked nice and hardened.

But, alas, when I had them checked for hardness, they measured the same as before my excursion into the black art of heat treating.

So... ...I conclude that the material does not have the needed amount of carbon lurking in the interstices of the iron atom matrix to make the hardening magic work.

Too bad. While I was a long way from suggesting that teams go out and do this themselves, I had hopes that we could set up a service where a team send their soft carriers to some FIRST friendly heat treating shop, they'd run the carriers through their ovens, drop them in an oil bath and ship them back the next day. It may have been 2 day round trip. Might have been a winner.

There is one plus to my failed homebrew hardening. If the RaMoore's part was not hard either (and I suppose it wasn't) then the test they did showed that the gearbox as shipped would have done just fine too.

I encourage others to help us determine the issues. If you run at test, document things as best you can and share your info with us all.

Finally, I want to try to stem some of the waves of panic that are going through the FIRST community (and I am going to yell here, so get your ears ready for the shock) WE STILL DO NOT KNOW THAT THESE GEARBOXES WILL ROUTINELY FAIL IN THE FIELD.

Really. The only field failure of this type that has been reported as of right now is the one reported by Team 166 and that was not a failure where the gearbox was NO-OP but that the backlash was noticeable after 3 hours of hard driving.

I am very confident that as we learn more about this issue, we will be in a position to come up with solutions to address them.

Stay tuned.

Joe J.