Really weird gearbox/motor problem
 

Ok so my problem is not about a Clodbuster or rock crawling but it is a problem that I think Clod guys would understand and maybe know why.

I have a Tamiya Wild Dagger that I let kids drive when ever I go out driving. It has two seperate gearboxes with their own motor, just like Clods do. The gearboxes are not connected to each other in any way and the motors are completely seperate from each other. I just put in some cheap 17 turn motors yesterday and today I noticed something. I have the motors wired in parallel and diffs locked. I held the truck in the air and slowly rotated the back tires forward. There was more resistance than there should have been. I kept rotating trying to figure it out. I gave the back tire a quicker spin and then the front tires spun a little too. Keep in mind the gearboxes are seperate from each other so that shouldn't happen. I spun the front tires forward quickly and the back tires moved as well.

I removed one motor spring and brush from the front motor and rotated the rear tires quickly again. This time everything felt normal and there was definatly less resistance than there was the first time. I reinstalled the brush and spring and the resistance was back.

Having been in the hobby for 14 years I have never seen this happen before. Could the rear motor be producing current as I spin the tire causing enough juice to make the front motor spin a little? Is this right or could there be something wrong?

nothing wrong with your rig... like you guessed at, when you spin one axle you turn the motor into a generator and it 'powers' the other axle.
On my crawler rig with two 55 turn motors it does this quite easily, on my other rig with 14 turn motors it is harder to do this. More motor winds create more power at lower rpms.

^^^like he said, when you turn one set of wheels the motor from that set generates a small current back to the other motor and causes it to slowly spin. it's not a problem.....it's normal.

Hmm, well ok. I never noticed it before when I had the stock silver can Johnson motors in it. But why is there more resistance in the motor?

By powering the other motor, its putting a load on the one your spinning. You can't have free energy man.

Huh, well I guess you learn something new every day. Like I said I had never seen this before so I was a little confused. Thanks for the info.

What they said. There is also a (much smaller) board devoted entirely to the Wild Dagger series here:

http://rcdaggerweb.com/clyde/blogs/index.php

in case you have any other issues related to that truck. Lots of good info there.

-val

also what he said, and if you spin it really fast it will lite up the speed controller"thumbsup"