Electric Gerbil gearboxes and axles

The Electric Gerbil is powered by two Tamiya 70103 Universal Gearbox kits. Here's a picture with dimensions, which is more for my reference than anything else:


They were cheap, but I now realise, are hard to get hold of in the UK. The motors are 3V. That's probably about right: I'm using 3AA batteries as power, and there's some voltage loss in the controller. I haven't bothered to find out how much.

You can also get alternative 6V motors to fit in this gearbox, which I have bought for the princely sum of £1.20 each. I can try that if the current arrangement doesn't work out.

I've also bought 4 of these: Pillow Blocks, and a 30mm aluminium L-Profile to mount them on, the idea being that the profile will make it easy to line up the bearings, and keep everything very rigid. I'm about to go and cut a couple of pieces, and drill them if I have time.



The gearboxes have a few different axle configurations, which you can't really see here: That box structure on the front can be rotated. That might give me a way to screw to motors in place on additional brackets. I'll just have to experiment.

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