[AdamHeard]

You could shorten the shaft via a hacksaw and then grinding the edges nice, we just chose to do it on a lathe for a nicer cut.

The motors were disassembled and reassembled by an engineer who knows motors, and they were reassembled into the same configuration. This purely modified the shaft, and is within the rules as I believe. This has been allowed in the past with the warning of, "be careful taking it apart, you could mess it up".