Supposed to be yes... but that wasnt the case like you can see

Here's a question, anyone have any success braking brushes in faster with the CS brushes in something other than water. In my experience water dipping produces an ugly comm.

Yes, but it took a long time (and a significant investment) to develop the correct fluid. As you have discovered, water has trace elements that scar the comm face.

The key for a TCS motor is not to break in the brushes too much while still breaking in the bushings so it spools up quickly.

Too small brushes = less torque and RPM climbs past the legal limit too quickly.

There may be, but for most of us who only do a few motors a year, plain water will give you acceptable results. If you're getting "ratty" looking comms, my guess is that you used too high a voltage or you let the water get too dirty before changing it.

I usually run the motors at 2v and use a container of water that holds at least 1/2 gallon of water. The practice of using a container like a cup from a fast food place is okay, but you have to change the water too often. Even with the large container I use, the water needs to be changed at least once and the motor should be finished in clean water at 2v.

I've never done this so don't know if it will work, but you could try this. Clean the comm with a metal polish, then water dip for a few minutes at low voltage. This probably won't work with a dirty comm for obvious reasons. I'm talking about reclaiming a motor with a rough comm after water dipping.

I don't use water to break-in motors but Mineral spirits.

You can also use a tool to push the brushes away from the comm and break-in the bushings with a metal polish/ dremmel tool first and then allow the brushes to hit the comm and mineral dip @ 2 -3 volts.
The pushing the brushes away from the comm keeps the motor from arching.
No ugly comm.

was wondering if anyone found success in useing a magnet zapper .

here's alot of motors tested, even the old white/beige plastic endbell johnson motor http://www.rct.jp/contents/lab/motor/lab008.html

i usually just buy a new one and put it in using thes slotcar comm drops,been experimenting with brasso to clean motor lately

What language is that?

The right comm drops can make up for a lot of mistakes...

The page is Japanese. Run the link through Google translate. It's still kind of gibberish, but it's interesting.

Doing this sort of stuff was common practice years ago. This should either be left to the real experts or the brave. Please be careful with what you're using to dip the motors in. We don't want anyone getting hurt.

Probably, but those who have ain't talking much. Don't blame them cause they probably invested a lot of tome and $$$$$

Works for me. Almost any metal polish will work tho some of the finer grit automotive polishes are better than Brasso. The real trick is how you get all that crap outta there.

When I didn't have mineral spirits handy I used distilled water. I also used the trick to hold the brushes away from the com and used some Trinity Bushing Buster with a variable speed Dremel to break in the bushings first. Also worked well with the old sealed 27 turn motors that all you could do is change the brushes.

sorry wrong post

Edit: Oops, was thinking of handout motors!

I would say that a lot of the better motors have to be zapped in some way. I'm sure it will be denied, but unless you crank comms, the motors have to be zapped to get the level of performance in the motors without getting lucky.

I found that you could get neo magnets from ebay, about 1x1x1", and get a decent level of performance that way. That size of a neo magnet will realign the magnet centers. Also remember that the magnets are really powerful and will FLY together if you get them too close, be careful!! I was able to reverse motors with the magnets I had. Basically, you are trying to move the magnetic centers and advance or retard timing depending on what you want out of the motor. The real problem is that done incorrectly, the motor will be screwed up. If you advance too far, the motor WILL scream, but have almost no torque and probably burn up almost instantly in a car. The motors I reversed never really ran right when I tried to put them back to normal orientation, but this may have been due to the fact that I wasn't using a real zapper.

The best thing if you want to try this is to try it on older not so good motors or dud motors. You'll learn more by doing than anything else.

It's been a while since I tried it, but if I remember right, you needed to orient the magnet to be attracted to the magnet you were trying to affect...?? Again, try on old motors. Once I figured out which way they went, I just marked the magnets + and - so you'll have to forgive my lack of recollection. Anyway, you don't want to go too close to the edges of the motor magnets, since that seemed to produce poor results. Most of the time about 3/4 either advanced or retarded was pretty good. You results may vary so just try this on junk motors to start. Once you set the magnets where you wanted, you can tap on the motor with a screwdriver handle or hammer to align the motor magnets' fields. Yes, that sounds nutty, but I read an old article on how to recharge magnetos on old time cars, and that was part of the process.

I was dynoing motors on a TurboDyno, and I found I could probably get 90% of the performance of the "name" motors that I had to compare to. My motors tended to run a hotter temp than the professionally done stuff, but I enjoyed trying to learn how to do this. I think there were some other aspects of break in and comm treatment etc, that I was missing, but I felt the majority of the performance was in the magnets.

For the last few hundred rpm, you can also squeeze the cans in a vise. Moving the magnets toward the arm was more torque, away was more rpm, but this really was a fine tuning thing more than the way to total performance. I never got more than a few hundred rpm either way.

One other thing that made them seem to run better was pushing the magnets toward the top (comm area) of the motor. Somebody showed me this, and it usually seemed to help.


The reason I am bringing up the magnets is that I tried a lot of weird brush treatments, trying to manipulate the springs, etc.etc. and all I got was trashed motors. Playing with magnets provided the real results.

BTW, Slick 7 voodoo slot car comm drops are supposed to be good....I had tried a lot of the rc car stuff, but I was told that was the stuff to try.