The Care and Feeding of your Castle Motor

- The full article was originally published on Castle -

Obviously, you must match your pinion gear to motor shaft size. If your vehicle has massive power and torque and is run in abusive environments, a larger shaft may be the best choice.

Shaft sizes include 2mm, 1/8” (3.2mm), 5mm, and 8mm,; with 2mm used in 1/18th, 1/8” (3.2mm) being the most common for 1/14th and lighter 1/10th vehicles, 5mm for heavier 1/10th and 1/8th, and 8mm for 1/6th scale and larger.

It really comes down to a strength issue, or shaft size, but adapter sleeves are available to convert 5mm pinions to 1/8” if necessary. Castle offers several motors that come in both 3.2mm and 5mm shaft sizes. Castle also offers a wide range of pinion gears.

Wire

High strand count silicone coated copper wire is essential with higher power electric power systems. Castle Creations’ wire (on motors and ESC) is lower resistance than the same diameter of solid copper, meaning more power gets from the batteries to the motor with less wasted as heat. The ultra-high strand count and silicone coating means the wire is very flexible which prevents hardening and breakage with use. Our wire is available for purchase and this link provides the appropriate wire gauge for your Castle ESC. (Link: http://www.castlecreations.com/wire-application-chart)

Wire Length

Motor wires can absolutely be shortened, with the exception of our 1/18th scale 0808 motors. In fact, the shorter the wires the better (in high-speed setups this equals less resistance), they are only too short if they can’t connect to the ESC. 🙂

Note: It takes a very hot soldering iron to get a good connection.  It can be very difficult to solder to the solder tabs; it is best to do it on the bullet connector end. Cut to length, unsolder bullets from removed wire, solder bullets onto shortened wires, then add new heat shrink. Let us know if you would like to see more on this subject!

Batteries

As with any extremely high-powered electric power system, the primary limitations to ultimate vehicle performance are the batteries and connectors. When choosing a LiPo battery for your brushless motor and/or ESC, you should refer to Castle’s published battery capacity minimums to ensure your chosen batteries are suitable for the maximum current demands of a particular ESC/motor combination. This information can be found on the product pages of the Castle website.