Have you ever wondered what was inside the main breaker?
Ours failed during the Colorado Scrimmage so I decided to look inside. The lever is connected to a plastic shaft. The small part in the bottom left of the picture is the top half of the shaft, the rest protrudes through the rubber gasket. It was the shaft that failed, however, the real problem is inside as the lever was hard to turn and the shaft was overstressed.
The same thing happened to us. We put the new breaker on our prototype robot this year and it was sticky from the start. It failed just like yours did last week. It looks like some of us got a bad batch this year.
Come on, open it up the rest of the way! pull the rubber gasket off, let’s see what’s inside! There’s probably something not right that is causing the shaft to be hard to turn. Lack of lubricant? parts not made to size?
We had a switch fail on us too. We grabbed one off of an old robot to replace it. (These switches are available from marine supply stores like West Marine FYI, or at least the one near me carries them.)
We put the new breaker on the robot right before shipping it, so I guess we better bring along the previous year breaker that we used for all our build season testing.
Thanks for letting us know about the problems!
I have noticed ours is rather stiff to turn on too. Good idea about the spare.
Brian
I’ve seen the breakers at AutoZone as well.
Very similar breakers are sold many places, but many of them don’t have the “on” switch…they only have a reset button. Be careful what you buy.