Today was a first. My team found a way to strip the internal gears of the 393 motor. Has this ever happened to anybody else? Second is this because of the amount of load that is placed on the motor?
Haha, our club has quite a few motors with the internal gears stripped. Some of these are the way they are because we put too much load on them for too long, and they eventually become stripped. Many of these occur because we occasionally are too abusive with our motors.
It used to happen a lot more. They switched to cast gears about 2 years ago from powder metal based gears.
It can be done under large varying loads applied to the motor - like a heavy arm being asked to go immediately up and down over and over again. Smoothing out your motor changes can help alleviate this. Not putting full force on the motor as it crashes into the backstop you put on the top or bottom of the arm motion helps too.
Treat them nicely and they will treat you nicely back.