Vex Versaplanetary gearbox repair

[Dominick Ferone]

While at FLR we had mid match one of our lead screws stop running. When we went on field we spun the lead screw and it worked but we were worried we stripped all the gears. To our surprise when we opened up the gearbox the gears were fine. It wasn't until someone pointed out the gear had something on it we noticed the snap ring got pulled down and blocked the gear. We had this issue appear 3 or 4 more times during the day, the last being in between semis matches where we were quickly able to repair it. When we took it apart to work on a more permenant fix we noticed the groove for the snapping isn't deep enough to told it.

We are now going to try and deepen the groove and maybe switch to an eclip and run some stress test. Does anyone have other ideas to avoid this issue in the past or have run into this problem?