KOP Gearboxes and noises

[David Sherman]

I was curious if the gearboxes this year still rattle from the metal washer inside or if FIRST has tweaked it? Otherwise my drive team will need to get nylon washers and take apart the gearboxes haha, I think the point is made.

[Rick TYler]

So far, our new KOPboxes are like butter.

[David Sherman]

Thanks, thats a relief. I'll keep my fingers crossed for ours to run smoothly also.

[Arkorobotics]

Our gearbox makes some rattling noise, but very minimal and when it is understress it is pretty quite. Funny thing is that we always are missing 1 to 4 plastic spacers. But it's ok.. Osh is up the street. For all I know it should move smoothly, try grease if you need it, It can really help.

[Evil Robotics]

Team 1245 has noticed that if you squeeze the two motor toward each other a bad noise will go away. This was noticed on more than one gearbox. Ous solution was to use a large worm drive hose band clamp.

Has anyone noticed the same thing? Yes we did see the note on the set screw height.

[Gdeaver]

Did you check the Spring clip on the cim gear. Our clip was touching the opposing gear. A little grinding with a Dremel tool and sanding drum removed enough of the clip to give some clearance.

[ICE MAN]

we just finished putting our gear boxes back together and yes they do rattle. i heard from some post that if you grease all the gears and run them for 20-30 minutes at a time that eventually the noise becomes less and less. we are doing this and it is helping. hope this helps.

[Dick Linn]

LAst year, we had to pinch the two motors together with a hose clamp to eliminate noise. Maybe we didn't assemble something right, but that did the trick. The motors weren't in perfect alignment without them.

We'll know about this year's setup on Monday, but they don't look as bad. We did follow the instructions carefully and everything fits up better this year.

[Andrew Blair]

Originally Posted by Evil Robotics

Team 1245 has noticed that if you squeeze the two motor toward each other a bad noise will go away. This was noticed on more than one gearbox. Ous solution was to use a large worm drive hose band clamp.

Has anyone noticed the same thing? Yes we did see the note on the set screw height.

This is actually recommended by IFI, though they never suggested that you would need to use a hose clamp. By moving the gears together, you're changing (lessening?) the amount of backlash between drive gears in the box, which evidently needs to be adjusted in each individual gearbox.