[Turnination Guy]

Well clearly you should have been more specific in your first post then. You probably should have titled this thread “Motor Failure Modes”.

But the stock electronics will give out far before the motor does. Motors burning out are ALMOST a non-issue, because of the electronics limitations.


The main thing to kill motors is friction, and its effects on the motor. Friction causes heat, which will cause moving parts to heat up and eat through whatever they are in contact with faster. As you should have noticed from reading the forums like I told you to, heat is best eliminated by properly ventilating the motor can. The armature will circulate air like a fan, and keep the motor as comfortable as it can be. Ultimately, the friction based wear on the motor is what will kill it.

For example, on a motor being fed by direct power, the first thing to go might be the brushes, which would get ground down because of the increased wear at high speeds. This would keep the rest of the motor safe, assuming it actually is the first thing to go. Fortunately, the brushes are replaceable parts.

Of course, this also depends on whether you have bearings or bushings inside the motor can and end-bell. If you have bushings, they could very well be ground down enough that the commutator timing is thrown off, which would cause some very strange motor behavior. The motor can and end-bell can be replaced with ones that have bearings in them, to prevent that problem.

Nothing is going to happen to the magnets (unless they are Neodymium; they will die if they are overheated, or take a sharp blow of some kind), and I doubt anything will happen to the armature; and I don’t think we are dealing with wattages that would overpower our wire gauges, so that should be fine too.


If I am right (and I would certainly appreciate a second opinion on this), for our purposes it is not the electrical limitations of the motor that would make it fail, but rather the mechanical ones. The voltage and current constraints, fundamentally, are caused by the problem of loading up the car with battery weight. Unless there is some kind of freakish battery breakthrough tomorrow (and there isn’t), you won’t find a practical way to overload the car with electricity when building for RC purposes.

Alternately, if you are trying to figure out what kind of windings of what gauge of wire are safe to use, I already showed you where to get that. Anything outside of the range that those guys use probably isn’t of any use for RC purposes at all.