Versa Planetary Box - Planet Gear Seizing

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#1

Hello,

I ran Versa Planetaries in a 30lb “Battlebot” for the first time over the weekend and while the drive boxes (30:1) worked great, the weapon box (7:1) had an issue. In my first fight I had one of the planets seize up on it’s carrier pin. I greased the pins before I ran the boxes as well. I’m inputting about 50K rpm into the box, and I’m wondering if perhaps this is too much and caused things to get hot and expand.

The other thing I think could have happened, is there was too much radial load on the shaft. I had a double v-belt pulley mounted directly to the vex output shaft, near the middle of the shaft. I suspect maybe the tension on the V-Belts put enough of a radial load on the output hex shaft and may have caused this issue.

I ran a 9:1 in my next fight and didn’t appear to have an issue, but I only got to run it for about 1 minute.

Has anyone else experienced this?

#2

Wrong forum bud

#3

Matt,

50K RPM is about 2.5x the fastest motor we rate the VersaPlanetary for. Sounds like you were probably going too fast.

Regarding the radial load, were you supporting the other end of the output shaft? How much tension were you putting on the v-belts?

#4

I was not supporting the far end. But I also was not loading the shaft at the end either, more in the middle. Upon second thought I don’t believe it’s the radial load of the V-Belts, because they were not tensioned much at all when this happened, I think the 30:1 boxes for my drive wheels probably have more radial load and were fine.

#5