Some people that I’m close to have known that I’ve been dealing with an intermittent issue on my board pretty much since before TEF1 at K1 Circuit. (November 2024)
The right motor didn’t always wanna behave, sometimes would work fine, sometimes would act very grumbly and grindy almost like as if you gave 0 backlash spacing to the gears and decided to throw sand in the mesh as grease. Didn’t feel good but in the end was ridable.
I’ve ridden my board like this since then with the issue coming in and out, ESK8CON, Electrify Expo, Legends, if you saw me with inrunners and wondered why my board sounded funny, that was it.
I found at one point it was my shit ass sensor wire adapter that I made back then for the inrunners and promptly replaced, resoldered and added more strain relief on the wires, after which the issue went away for awhile but would always come back. NEVER ENDING POS. I kept thinking it was my sensors, the plugs, my wiring, interference from the output power I was hitting, nothing seemed to make sense.
Until @tuckjohn told me to try swapping the receiver to the other side which I did and the issue again came back. Now you may be thinking like how the hell does that help Jack??
At this point it finally altered my brain chemistry (thank you tucker) to stop going apeshit on the connectors because I had touched them all now and go a-ha and think more board related to the Tronic X12’s themselves.
No one else that I’ve helped with inrunners has had this issue but me so not a vesc firmware thing or a hobbywing 56118 or 70125 thing.
Looking at replacement board pricing I was looking at an eye watering $300 for just the board itself not another heatsink . Also I have no idea how reliable those Chinese websites are for Tronic hardware now that Tronic has seemingly kicked the can.
I decided to have a looksey at the board myself, I mean hell I do microsoldering as a part of my living right now! AND WHAT DO YOU FUCKIN KNOW…..
DO YOU SEE IT YET??
.
.
How bout now 
?
The right most gate driver for that MOSFET channel has soldering joints that are worse than Apple’s mux chips on early 2010s MacBook pros.
I COULD WIGGLE PINS 7 AND 8 FROM THE LEFT WITH TWEEZERS ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
Please excuse my language…
For some that may be loosely wondering what a gate driver is, basically a power amplifier ic to turn off and on the MOSFET’s really quickly. Without this they would not be able to turn on as quick or not at all and that leads to very very bad performance.
Sound familiar??
Sooooo after retouching all of these joints with my iron and inspecting all the other drivers too I saw similar cold joints that I also touched up. Inspected the other esc that wasn’t misbehaving, all of those joints were in tact (not airborne) but still looked pretty bad so I did those too.
Insert @tuckjohn like cat-er-mission
(My girlfriend Kate and I’s cute lil April girly 
)
Putting it all back together and got to try it at Saturday I2S San Diego and all was well!!
Got to try it again on my short commute to class that I normally euc to and from and hey! Still all good!
Worth noting that these roads are super bumpy. The motor behavior I would experience would flare up especially in these harsh environments.
Moral of it all!? Just because the thing used to cost $550 per esc and uses top of the line components does not always mean it’s gonna be assembled and put together well. It is worth nothing that most if not all of the other joints for other components looked okay to me.
My theory is that they did those parts by hand for some reason, maybe a defect that they had to redo themselves? I’m not sure. But if anyone else has Tronic X12’s with some weird motor behavior that isn’t: sensor dependent, rpm or speed dependent, or connector dependent, it may be worth having a look at these under a microscope!
If you are curious too, yes this issue was fixed AFTER I had already hit 69mph on this setup. And yes it does keep me up at night knowing I was riding that fast with wiggly pins.
STAY SAFE EVERYONE
And thank you @tuckjohn for encouraging me to poast about this one
glad it was fixable in the end 