Moar gearbox

Only just got round to finishing what I started on the gearboxes, finishing up my first year of college and starting at a new job kinda sucked a lot of my free time up. Not complaining as those are both very good things. Next year at college I should be actually be allowed to make things (things other than a plumb bob) and hopefully spend some time designing and making robots.

I'm big into quite heavy scribe lines at the moment. Normally with my parts only one side needs to be pretty so I can go to town. I centre punched the holes...kinda.. okay not gonna lie I used a screw and hammer then just started the holes with a hand drill. If you wanted proper machining techniques you're in the wrong place.

You can sort of see that one of the holes for the motor mounting is kind of a little wonky. Not to worry though it seems to work okay.

Did some scribing on the body of the gearbox too. "Centre punched" those too. I don't think you can see that in the photo or maybe I did it after taking this.

Drilled the holes on the motor plate. Used my neato little clamp my Dad bought for me to hold it down. I find its really useful when you have to do a few holes in the same thickness material. Managed to get the holes pretty much perfectly positioned. I don't know how I managed anything before drill press.

Drilled more holes into the main body of the gearbox and tapped those out to M5. Only did one side's worth of holes as I want to add a motor retaining plate but I'm not quite sure how I want to attach it to the rest. Also I had no idea if it was going to work and 2 wrong holes is better than 4.

It looks pretty good to me. Stuck it together with a couple of button head stainless M5 bolts.

3" banebots wheel on for the hell of it. It doesn't work like this as there is another stage of gearing still to be put on.

Ran it on one of my cheapy ESCs. It doesn't sound too pretty which is a bit of a bummer. However the motor doesn't get hot, nor does the controller. I think with a bit of tweaking it should run happy.

It seems a little "meh" but that is partially due to the unhappy gearbox and the fact it is an 18v motor run on 12v. For the first time in years I might actually have to buy a cordless drill or two to hack apart for components.


I've got a beetle or two in the works at the moment, but will save all their content up for a single post instead of stringing out dribs and drabs.

Cheers, Haz.