This year we are using WCP SS gearboxes, And we are seeing alot of gear wear. We were trying to use the Dry Grease recommended by WCP and some of the people on here, but it really does not seem to be working. Yesterday at Portland we cleaned out all the metal shavings, and about 2 matches later the gearboxes were covered in them again. I have heard that the gears are supposed to feel slightly sticky after applying, but ours do not seem to be doing that. What is the correct method for applying grease to the gears? We are going to be replacing all of them except for the steel CIM gears at worlds, so if they require time to settle we will be able to do that.
The idea behind dry grease is to not attract dust and metal particles, which cause significant wear. Regular or sticky grease is also fine, BUT you need to clean the grit from the gears often or expect a lot of wear.
Thad, the aerosol form of the grease you mentioned is indeed what we recommend. We typically spray our gearboxes once during assembly, and once every competition. We spray the each of the gears while spinning it by hand, and then let it dry for 5 minutes. You could certainly apply more grease, if you wanted. Using this grease/method we see very little debris and wear on the gears. Our comp robot this year has almost no visible wear, and the practice robot is starting to show wear on the coating, but it has been run almost everyday since week 5 of build. We prefer the dry grease in our gearboxes because it does not make a mess or pick up debris from the ground.
If you are seeing light debris and wear from the coating of the gears, this could be just normal wear, depending on the amount of run time your robot has had. However, if you are seeing significant debris, and wear beyond the coating of the gears, this could be signs of another issue besides normal wear, such as the CIM mounting. Send us an email at support AT wcproducts.net, we can help you diagnose/understand what you are seeing.
We are defiantly seeing actual tooth wear on all 3 aluminium gears in the gearbox. The plates of the gearbox are covered in metal shavings from the gears, and the teeth of the gears are defiantly worn down. Are you going to be at worlds? We will be removing the gearboxes from the robot on Wednesday afternoon if you would like to come take a look and see if we are doing something wrong with the setup.