So tonight while I had my enclosure opened to work on my receiver, I decided to rotate my wheels, clean my TBDD hangars/motors, and saturate the space between the hangar/motors with thermal paste.
I’ve noticed a couple benefits so far besides what seem like lower temps (don’t have my full power board built back up just yet and it was cooler out tonight)
First, the paste eliminates the motor chatter completely. That small space on the square part of the hangar, the motor rotates around that just enough to clack sometimes when braking, accelerating, or from bits of cogging at 0 speed. With the paste in there, that’s gone and they are always 100% smooth.
Secondly, and probably more importantly to this topic, the motor cans are noticeably cooler than the hangar/cooling fins now. Before, they were about the same temperature when heating up (cans might have actually felt hotter than the hangar itself), but now the fins are definitely doing more heat-sinking than the cans themselves. The motor temp drops a lot quicker now too.
I really can’t wait to try statorade in these motors now to see how combined thermal paste between motors/hangars + statorade works to keep these things cool. I also can’t wait to pull 160 battery amps through these again to really torture the crap out of them and see how these cooling solutions do under extreme load.
The only downside I can see is the mess. It’s messy.