FP ok to stall?

[FoleyEngineer]

In '08 we winched our catapult down with two FPs. Of course it would stall when we were winched until we hit the fire button. In initial testing, the kids would often keep it tensioned for long periods of time (10 seconds I would guess). Eventually, they smoked a FP and upon looking at it we saw that the plastic fan blades inside the motor housing were actually melted from the heat!

Our solution was to put heat sinks on them from an RC hobby shop (designed to fit around motors that size), and also to mount fans (like the ones on the Victors) that blew continuously over those heatsinks. That kept our FP motors cool even with long stalls and we never blew one the rest of the year through probably 100 matches. Limiting the current helps a ton too. The combination should do the trick. Pick up a non-contact temp probe from Harbor Freight and check your motor temps with various cooling and current systems and you won't have to guess if you're okay or not.