breaking in electric motor

Seems like I read some where that you need to break in an electric motor. something about getting the brushs worn in. Suppost to make the motor last longer and get more flying time. Any thoughts???

I have had four electric heli's two brushless and two brushed and never did any kind of break in and they all ran fine while I had them but the one I have left is a brushless so i cannot say for sure but I have never heard of breaking in a electric motor maybe someone else can shed some light on this better than I can.

When a motor is new the brushes and commutator (rotating copper bit) may not match precisely. The idea of 'running in' a motor is to allow the brushes to polish up the commutator and vice versa, this reduces friction and gives the greatest possible contact area between the two parts. If you put full current on a new motor there will be hotspots where the brushes happen to make best contact and this may pit the commutator and cause the brushes to wear and burn up faster, in the worst case the commutator and brushes will never bed into each other. Sounds spookily sensible so far? . But modern controllers control speed by varying the interval between pulses of very high current rather than by actually reducing the current so I'm not sure you can effectively 'run in' a motor once it's connected up to the controller. And heli motors have a very hard life anyway so being nice to them when they're new will probably make very little difference later on. That said, I think most heli motors would consider it a kindness if you ran them at low revs for a few minutes before applying full throttle though I have absolutely no idea how much difference this will make to the life of the motor.

[Evilone]

I used to break in tail rotor motors by puting them in a glass of water and running them on a constant speed for 10-15 minutes.
Seemed to make them last longer

You wouldn't be a submariner by any chance would you?

[thecheat]

actually you're supposed to let them run until the brushes are completly seated on the contact. or ou could just go brushless as they should last nealy forever.