I have a gear ratio of 25:1 and is powered by 4 high strength motors. It will spin for 10 seconds, and then it stops. When we wait 5 minutes, it is at its normal pace and then it stops again after 10 seconds. It was working perfectly for 2 weeks and now it’s stalling. Please help. I have a competition in 9 days.:eek::eek:
If it was working perfectly 2 weeks ago, then adding more motors may not be the problem. Do you have a picture of the shooter that you can post?
Anyways, if you have gearboxes on your shooter, they might be too tight, causing friction. Also, if you do not have grease already on your gears, try putting white lithium grease, that should help. Lastly, we found that using the metal 12 tooth gears adds a lot of friction to the shooter, so we replaced these high strength gears with regular 12 tooth gears.
Your PTCs are tripping. What must be happening is that in the previous weeks, you ran your flywheels for a short time, allowing the PTCs to cool down. Now that you are (presumably) running mock- tournaments, your PTCs are running for longer, slowing down your shooter. This happened to our team.
Also, in case you were wondering, the PTC is a circuit board in motor. When they overheat, they slow the motor down so the motor doesn’t break.
Hope this helps!
Yes, it sounds like your motors are overheating and tripping their PTCs. Check to see if the structure that supports your gear bearings has been warped somehow or come loose somewhere. If your support gets warped, the resulting misalignments stress the shafts and friction can go up quite dramatically. With the extra friction, the motors draw more current and therefore trip out the PTCs a lot faster.
If you suspect you have friction, try physically disconnecting the motors and see if things can be hand-spun on their own without grinding to a halt too quickly.
We had a similar issue and it turned out we forgot to put bearings somewhere so the shaft had worn a pretty good groove in the plate it was in. The wheels would get spinning then the shaft would meet resistance in the groove causing the motors to overheat and the flywheel to stop.