[d.courtney]

After having a week of off build, something nobody on our team wanted but weather in our area isn't too predictable and all the roads in the area were closed for 8 days and no school for a week, we obviously were very eager to get some testing on our attachments. After running the attachment for no longer then 15-20 sec (and those first 15 seconds ran great) the thing stopped dead in its tracks. I thought at first it may have been a bad wire or battery, but this wasn't the case... what we had was possibly the quickest failure (and from what FIRST claims in the Updates, one of the first failures) of the banebots 12:1 gearbox. All this under designed conditions. This happened today around 7:00, quickly putting an end to what work we needed to do. Below are pics of how it turned out.

We had taken all the precautions to avoid this from happening including a programmed smoothing function as to avoid a jerk back a forth. we had decided early on not to use them as drive gear boxes due to the quality of material, which seems now to be a profitable decision. Below are two pictures one, a cleaned up version (no lubricant) of how it looked after pulling the gearbox apart, and two the backside of it and the damage done.

We are currently drafting an email for FIRST and BaneBots as to what happened.