Well after months of waiting, I finally received the motor back from John Wayland.  The White Zombies driver Tim had reported what he felt like was the armatures spinning loose from the custom shaft that was used to fuse the two ADC 8″ motors together.  This was not a happy report to hear so I’ve been waiting to get it back so I could see what’s going on and the true nature of the damage.

Removing the rear end plate the first thing I saw was a very sever damage caused from when the brushes arced over and just vaporized the brush ring assy as can be seen here.  Take a good look and you can see that there are huge chunks of brush completely missing!  This is by far the worst flashover seen to date allowing Mr. Wayland to keep his plasmaboy crown 8^P

Upon removing the drive end housing I noticed that the armature had rubbed against the field coil pole shoes.  These are the 4 laminated metal pieces used to hold the coils in place as well as produce the field magnatism.   Although I had seen a hint of this after the Woodburn flashover this was a pretty hard rub.  Being that this motor now only uses 3 bearings it’s my best guess that what is happenening is the motor is flexing under what now must be getting close to 800 ft lbs of torque.  I believe this occurs because the motor is not mounted throughout it’s full length but at just the sides and then on the front end via the CE end bell leaving almost a third of the motor just hanging out.

The front section is in awesome shape with none the worse for wear on all parts and workings.   Although this side produces just half the power it does suggest that it’s three point mounting (two on sides and one at the end) keeps this half solid in place.  Returning to looking at the rear side you can see where the armature rubbed the pole shoes here.  As you can see it hit on all four shoes but did not hit down the full length but just toward the end.  In fact the further out the harder it hit.  Now if we look at how the motor is mounted and it’s farthest mount point it’s exactly where the rubbing begins as seen here.  Now as I’ve posted some quick reports to the EVDL some have wondered if the shaft is bowing between the middle and final rear bearings.  If this were the case the full length of the shoes would have been hit which is not the case.  IMO the only thing that could cause this type of rubbing is if the whole ass end is wagging around in circles under really hard loads.  Wayland has told me he will lock the DE down and after seeing the damage, hopefully he will be running the 11’s here soon.  As the Siamese8 has only had a couple of flashovers and both on the rear side and where I noticed rubbing afterwards I believe that the rubbing may have in fact helped to cause the flashovers, sure didn’t help 8^o

Anyway I wanted to get at least a couple pics up so I could show what I’m talking about.