Scotty909

I'm building a GWS Tiger Moth with the stock brushed motor and esc. they both have way to much wire leads and I was thinking of cutting them down to save weight. Will this be a problem? I did a search but didn't find anything.

Thanks Scotty

rcers

Motor wires are best left alone - the battery and ESC are fine to shorten.

Tepid Pilot

Even on a brushed motor? Two wires?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's okay to shorten the wires on a brushed motor.

TP

JetPlaneFlyer

Yes on a brushed motor it's ok.

The reason you don't want to cut the wires on a brushless is because the wires that stick out are usually extensions of the coil windings. The wire is most often multiple strands of very fine magnet wire which is coated with high temperature lacquer. This lacquer is almost impossible to strip of the hair like strands so you cant get a decent solder joint onto the wire.
Many a motor has been wrecked when people have cut the wires.

riverrat

Guys

I shortened motor wires before I found out
you shouldn't do it. Brushed & Brushless.

Never had a problem, I made sure the wires
were cut to the same length & the bare wire
to be soldered was cleaned several times.
I heated the bare wires & dipped them in
brasing flux, plus sanding & scraping.
I havn't done it again, but both motors
still going after 5 yrs.

As for the ESC I shorten them all the way
to the PC board if needed, but this short
be quick & use lots of heat sink

Regards
Jimmy

JetPlaneFlyer

Yeah, it can be done sometimes. It depends how fine the wire strands are and the type of lacquer used. Higher quality motor have high temperature multi layer lacquer that's really hard to shift. Scraping is ok but massively tedious and if the strands are fine it's all too easy to break the wire. I've yet to find any solvent that will remove it.
Also even if you do get a soldered connection to take, if you didn't do a good job of stripping every single strand then only some of the strands carry any current making the motor run hot and loose performance.

Best not to go there IMHO, just tuck the wires away.

riverrat

JPF

Yeah! I remember it was a job. I think I
got a real good tin job on the cut ends of the wires.
Now I have learned better, I was lucky!

Regards
Jimmy

Scotty909

I want to thank you all for the great info on this. I'm pretty sure I read not to cut brushless wires but wasn't sure about brushless. I have a Tekin 35T handwound motor on my rock crawler and just soldered those wires to the post and cut down the esc wires. It has worked fine so far. This is the only brushless motor I've set up in a plane so far and just thought i'd ask.

Thanks again, Scotty