Dewalt transmission problems?

[John Gutmann]

Originally Posted by rees2001

...but if you never screw up how will you know if something doesn't work.

Amen to that!

[evelyn1503]

last year we used it on our arm and we had no problems so

[s_forbes]

We followed this whitepaper to make some 3 speed DeWalt transmissions and they worked well for the price.

We did encounter one major problem however, during one match we completely lost the drive to one side of our robot. We brought it back to the pits to test it out, and it appeared to be working fine. During our next match though, our drive was still out on that side so we replaced the transmission.

We disected it when we got home and discovered that the tophat gear that attaches directly to the motor had slipped on the shaft and could be kept from turning in high torque situations. We were suspisious of this when we first made the transmissions, but they had a very high success rate and we trusted them to hold up nicely. We decided that it was a slight error in our machining and just left the robot as is for the next regional. We still had one more spare after all...

Then at the next regional, it happened again. We put in the last replacement and decided to try and make a quick reliable fix incase we broke another one. We keyed the plate that the tophat gear screws onto with a file and put a key on the motor. Then we stuck locktite on it and used 1388's vice to press the gear back onto the motor shaft (thanks again 1388!).

We put the new transmission in before the finals and it held up beautifully. We shall see how it works at nationals.

[sanddrag]

We asembled a Dewalt with Fisher Price. We ruined two motors trying to press fit the gear on with it reamed to .1255 I'd go slightly bigger than that if I were you. Other than that, we had no problems, but it didn't actually make it onto the robot due to weight.