Hello vex community.
I’ve just started to run a vex club at the school that I work at. My students really want to use high speed motors, but after some research, I’ve found some troubling accounts of motors breaking after there internal gearing was changed to high speed. I want to know if it’s worth possibly breaking motors or dramatically increasing friction to have the gearing on the inside rather than the outside. My first though is that the point of weakness is moved from the outside of the motor to the inside.
Any thoughts?
-The beaumont high roboteers
Internal motor gears only increase the risk of damage if the gear ratio is off. Theoretically internal gears reduce the number of external gears and actually reduce friction. There shouldn’t be any problems with it, so long as your gear ratio stays reasonable.
If you have a system, say your drive base, which barely has enough torque with 1:1 internal gearing, changing it to high speed (1.6:1) would cause issues. If you reduced the external gearing so that the compound ratio is the same as before, now with high speed, your friction will likely be reduced and there shouldn’t be any problems with motors breaking.
This is all good information here, and I have never had a motor be more prone to being broken simply because it was a high speed configuration. What people talk about most when they refer to broken motors are the gears that are located in the bottom (green side) of the motor. Specifically, the one underneath the first gear that you see when opening the covering is the worst and is most likely to be stripped of its teeth. I’ve had this happen on all 3 configurations though, so I wouldn’t necessarily attribute a certain internal gear set to this problem.
Edit: Found some handy information including this chart which can be seen here.
Thanks, that’s all good feedback.
Everything that I’ve heard is about says that if something breaks, it should be on the outside of the motor so that it doesn’t result in a broken motor, but now I realize that that logic is flawed.