I hope other teams have avoided the problems that we have experieicned this year. I am now at the point where I am not sure how many motors we have broken (we have three FTC teams). The problem occures when the motor is put under stress. For example, when the motor is powered on at full strength to turn a 1:16 gear ratio that shoots the ball. We have had to resort to ramping up the speed, but this does not always work. The exact problem is that the final internal gear in the motor gear train literally explodes into pieces under this stress. We have attempted to obtain replacement gears, but this are not available from Pitsco although they did agree to replace three of the broken motors without cost.
I would appreciate knowing if others have experienced this problem and if you have a workable solution. I also hope that if this is a general problem, we can influence a change in the materials used for this gear and a way to obtain replacement gears so that those that do fail can be fixed.
