Our double flywheel has 4 motors has the issue of the right bank of motors overheating. The motors start up fine, and shoot fairly accurately for several minutes until the the right side slowly slows down and then stops. We have noticed the that the right front motor is always hot, especially compared to the right rear. We replaced both right motors and noticed the same issue. Both motors are working independently, but neither can start the flywheel on it’s own. We can spin the each fly wheel for about 1 or 2 seconds freely, or about 2 or 3 rotations. Is it the friction, or is it a wiring issue?
Personally, I would attribute it to friction since as we all know by this time in the year the smallest things can make a difference. Try checking axles and or pieces that are specifically attributed to that motor. I cant think of a reason though why wiring would be bad unless the motor controller was doing something weird which is still very doubtful.
We had the same issue; it was all friction, we changed the structure of the flywheel and got almost no friction and now motors don’t heat up at all. We also changed from the standard gears to high-strength gears. We use 4 motors on our launcher with a 15:1 ratio. Feel free to ask anything if you need help.
P.S. You could use compressed air as a last resource to cool down the motors.
(We did, and somehow, it worked.)
Standard gears are “high strength gears”… I assume you mean speed internal switched to a torque internal gearing.
Also there must have been a lot of friction somewhere if a 24-1 fly wheel was burning out. Even if you were using turbo gears for a 36-1 I have seen teams that could do it with a relatively small time to get rid of friction.
I think he means external gears.
Ah my bad, but that actually makes it different, it is very hard to burn out a 15-1 with 4 motors due to friction…
I would assume he is using speed motors with a 15:1 to get full court. I did some testing and it seemed to me that a 15:1 with torque only just makes it in. Then again we also abandoned the double flywheel and didn’t spend a lot of time reducing friction.
Your problem is most likely friction. If the wheel only spins one or two revolutions when free spinning (depending on how hard you spin it) then you have far too much friction for your flywheel to be efficient.
I think he means with the motors, but the problem is still most likely friction, especially if the left side is not burning out.
If they are running their flywheels without a ratcheting system it could also be damaging to the motors.
I have seen a ton of flywheels without ratchets, I don’t think that is the problem
I don’t think the ratchets are necessary, the whole movement for ratchets was sort of based on speculation and keeping up with the joneses. The burning out issue has temporarily resolved itself, but we’re not sure.
My word of advice would be getting a thermal thermometer and measuring the heat of the motors whenever they do trip. Unnecessary friction is most likely causing your motors to heat up. Make sure bearings are aligned. I actually went ahead and made a post earlier regarding the alignment of our bearings being a cause for unnecessary friction and mechanical inefficiencies. There’s only so much you can do in a competition environment though. Our team gets electronic duster, turn it upside down, and use it as coolant for overheated motors. We had a motor one time at 117 degrees and it actually cooled it down to about 30. How it got to 117 without the PTC tripping beforehand, I will never know. Hope this helps friend.