Our team has noticed some of our older bag motors (4 years max) have begun to corrode/rust and stink like all heck. Is there any way to prevent or fix this?
Recycle it… its probably from humidity, we had problems like that a few years ago and got a dehumidifier for the shop.
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Good idea. Ill talk to my team about possibly getting a small one to put in our motor box. Maybe silica desiccant with a fan would do the trick
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If you put desiccant into a box, you do not want a fan. That will just keep circulating humidity back into the containers. Get a sealing box or ziplock bags, put desiccant in, and seal it all.
Do they smell when running (ozone type smell)? I have a collection of model trains from the 1920s that rarely get run and when I do run them, they will exhibit that smell for a few minutes until all the dust and corrosion wears off the motor brushes. They always manage to clean themselves out well enough to keep running. So, the motors are not necessarily dead. However, running model trains around the Christmas Tree is maybe not as mission critical as a motor on your robot when you are in the finals. So, if you can afford to recycle those and get new ones, that is probably the safest route.
Something like this tells you when it needs to be baked dry and then you reuse it. Don’t blow it around with a fan and don’t breathe the dust.
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On the topic of safety with color-changing silica gel: it’s probably safer to get the orange-to-colorless variety.
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Thanks for the safety tip. (Another child-hood toy that shouldn’t be touched and we didn’t have seat-belts, either). Here’s the pertinent part for those who didn’t read the whole article and see there are two kinds of orange and this is the one to get: (And still DON’T breathe the dust!)
Ferric and ferrous salts, sometimes combined with small amounts of sodium hydroxide, provide a better alternative. In particular, ferric sulfate and double salts like ammonium iron(III) sulfate (iron alum), ammonium iron(II) sulfate, and potassium iron(III) sulfate all result in a color change from amber/yellow when dry to colorless/white when saturated.
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Our team is going to start a system of marking motors based on smell and year and simply take the bad/old ones to give away at competition. has anyone ever had this happen to a full size cim motor before? we have only ever had issues with bags specifically.
the new ones that aren’t even crimped yet smell very faintly of ozone but the rusted ones smell like chlorine mixed with rust
If you have a lot of motors that show these symptoms, it might be worthwhile to take one apart and see what’s gone wrong with them!
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