698's Fisher Price Motor Fix

[Alex698]

For this year's game we (698) used one fisher price motor to run our spinning wheel for our poof-ball launcher. We did have one issue that I would like to announce and tell how we have fixed it.
We quickly found that the life of the motor was around 800 poof-ball shots, then it would have to be replaced, mostly because we were burning up the motor . Recently when we were redesigning the launcher to shoot shirts, I came across one of our past "dead" motors. I found that the reason the motor was failing was due to the fact it was overheating. The reason it was overheating was the little white fan (on the inside) was made of plastic and whenever the motor would heat up too much, the fan would melt off of the tiny axle and become worthless.
While redesigning the robot we added two 12vdc victor fans to the top and bottom housing for the motor mount. The forced airflow has extended the life of the motor greatly! I would recommend this to any FIRST team with similar problems.