[Bob Steele]

We used a pair of the 42 mm gear boxes mated with FP motors to bring our lift up and down. Initially we had some issues in Portland for several reasons.

The two motors had to drive in opposite directions because of our design and there was some type of stall activity (perhaps a looped line or something) that caused on side of the gear box to not be able to turn. This "allowed " the other gearbox to grind the non-moving one to pieces. Unfortunately this caused massive shearing of the gear teeth in both gear boxes. Also, unfortunately, this occurred in the quarterfinals requiring us to withdraw.

When we assessed the issue, I don't believe that we felt it had anything to do with any inadequacy in the gearboxes. We redesigned the lift and stiffened up everything and rebuilt in Seattle and we NEVER had another problem.

We have talked to Banebots about this and some other issues and they have told us that they are going to use steel gears next year in these transmissions.

We felt very happy with the gearboxes and the number of different ratios certainly gave us several options.

We would certainly continue to use these transmissions in the future.

One interesting note is that the motors that were running the transmissions that ate each other up were not damaged at all...

We really felt that the FP motors this year were very robust. I believe that they had thermal overload built in and that made a huge difference compared to years past. Even though the FP and the 550 had very similar motor curves, the FP motors were definitely more robust and able to handle stall conditions much better than the 550's.

These gearboxes are available on the website but listed under gearmotors and not gear boxes.... they come with a cheap 550 motor which does not have a fan.. These should be removed and replaced with a kit motor. either the 550, the FP or the 540 motor.. I would not suggest that you should use the 550 motor that is included with the gearboxes from Banebots.

We would definitely recommend the 42 mm gearboxes in the future to other teams. They are easy to mount and IF used with the proper engineering considerations, very useful and robust.