After finally getting the darned thing apart, and printing a new outer housing, I went about re-assembling the whole mechanism.  This time, I tried to take care to make the future disassembly less painful.

To start with, I filed down the problematic outer bearing interfaces of the sun gear holder so that the bearings were a slip fit over them.  These two interfaces don’t need to be particularly snug, so that was easy enough, if monotonous, to accomplish.  I also machined out a some pockets around the magnet hole, to make it possible to just hot-glue the position magnet in place and more easily extract it.

Next, I re-installed the sun gear holder back in the rotor.

After that, I pressed the input bearing into the new planet input:

Then I went about installing the shaft output bearing into the planet output, the planet output into the output bearing, the planet shafts into the planet output, the planet bushings into the planets, and the planet bearings into the bushings.

Those got dropped onto the shafts, and the planet input was stuck into place.

After that, the screws were installed in the planet input, and the stator was fit onto the front housing, using a shrink fit again:

At this point, I aligned the rotor and pressed it and the primary shaft into place.

Now I used my paper strip alignment technique to get the rotor properly (or at least functionally) spaced from the stator.

At this point, the rotor still didn’t spin freely.  Because of all the rework I’ve done, and my sloppiness in executing it, bits of the exploded bearings and other detritus had lodged themselves against the rotor and stator.  The problematic pieces were small, sub 5 thousandths, but still plenty enough to cause the rotor to hang when spinning.  These I carefully extracted under a microscope with a pair of tweezers.

At this point, I had a gearbox that spun freely and seemed mostly correct!

So, last time I had a functioning gear-train, I just needed to disassemble everything in order to replace the outer housing.  As I was putting things together, I realized that several custom fixtures would likely be needed in order to disassemble various parts cleanly.  Here, I made a giant 3D printed cylinder that the front housing and planet output would bolt to, and then the central shaft could be pressed out.

I somewhat skimped on the printing… even at 25% infill it took something like 14 hours, however the shaft should be relatively easy to extract since it is only held via a mild press fit with the output shaft bearing.  Or at least, it would have been had my mild press fit not ended up being tighter than desired, and had retaining compound not seeped over there.

My first attempt at removal just resulted in my carefully constructed fixture delaminating and the entire planet output and output bearing pushing into the assembly.  The shaft didn’t budge at all on the shaft output bearing.  Then, rather than wait for an even longer print, I installed all the washers on each of the bolts to better distribute the load across the fixture.  At that point, removal was accomplished…. kinda.  The fixture didn’t fail this time, but the planet input in the gearbox shredded.  Fortunately, that was enough to remove the rotor.  I could just print a new planet input, and toss the shaft which now appeared very well welded to its bearing.

Rest of the disassembly

At this point, the rotor was removed from the stator, but there was still a fractional planet input attached to it, with the planet input bearing very securely fastened to the sun gear holder, and the rotor bearing, even more securely fastened to the sun gear holder.

First, I shredded the planet input with a pair of pliers.

Then, I was able to get the input bearing off by cooling down the sun gear holder with the compressed air again.

However, the rotor bearing was too well pressed on to achieve that.  So I ground it off with a cutoff wheel, after trying a few other things first.  At this point, I was finally able to remove the sun gear holder from the rotor, and call my disassembly, as it were, complete!

Last time I covered getting to the point of having the rotor installed into the gearbox.  Here we’ll look at making it actually work in that configuration.

When I first got the rotor in place, it was clearly not centered properly.  Although much closer than in the plastic gearbox, it did interfere with the stator during a portion of a revolution.  The first obvious problem was that the primary shaft wasn’t making it all the way through the front shaft bearing.  That should have been an easy fix, but for two different very annoying reasons.

Reason 1

When I made the sun gear holder, one of the tweaks I made during my 3d printed iterations was to leave a hole where you could press on the primary shaft.  That was intended to be used to install it all the way into the output bearing.  Unfortunately, that hole is behind the position sensing magnet.  The one that I superglued in place last time overly eagerly.

That magnet has a recess in the sun gear holder which nearly exactly encloses it, with maybe only a few thousandths around it in all directions.  There was no way to grip the magnet at all.  I tried soaking the junction in acetone for some time, I tried using the heat gun, and in the process ruined the 3d printed outer housing, but none of those loosened it up enough to allow another magnet to retrieve it.

Eventually I pressed on the primary shaft from the front of the motor, and used that to pop out the position sensing magnet.

Reason 2

Now that I had the magnet off, I could press the shaft back into place.  Or at least I should have been able to.  I made it into the output bearing, but then the pressing became inordinately difficult.  I think even more so than in any of my test fits.  This may have had two causes… one is that I was using a dowel for the main shaft which is slightly oversized, and second the retaining compound had seeped around into the interior of the bearing, and fractionally cured.  Those combined made it both really hard to push the shaft in, and as I later discovered, impossible to press out.

Aligning the rotor and stator

At this point, I had the rotor installed seemingly properly, and it still was interfering with the stator.  After much experimentation, including partially exploding the rotor bearing on the sun gear holder, I arrived at a technique that allowed me to align them properly and simultaneously discovered that my intended mechanism for registering the rotor to the sun gear holder was, at the least, sub-optimal.

The sun gear holder has 4 M3 flat head bolts which fasten it to the rotor.  I had oversized those holes to 3.1mm, and put tapered countersinks on each.  I had planned on the countersinks forcing the rotor to be centered.  However, it didn’t look like that was working as I had expected.  Each time I would loosen up the bolts and re-tighten them, the rotor would interfere with the stator in a different way.  Eventually, I was able to center them by sliding slips of paper all around the stator between it and the rotor, then tightening the bolts down.

Then I spent a few hours, painstakingly under the microscope, picking out grains of steel that had managed to find their way to the rotor, most likely from when I partially exploded the rotor bearing.

Success?

At this point, the rotor did seem to be aligned properly to the stator, everything moved freely, and the gearbox worked as expected.  I just need to disassemble everything in order to install a new outer housing to replace the one I destroyed while attempting to remove the position sensing magnet.  That is its own story, for next time.

Shortly after receiving the sun gear holders, I received the first iterations of the planet output and front housing.

Both of these seem to have actually adhered to the tolerances I requested, so thankfully it won’t be too hard to fit everything together.  However, getting everything together for the first time did involve a comedy of errors — a lack of planning for assembly order, a lack of foresight into how things would be *dis-assembled*, a stubbornly stuck shaft, and plenty of broken parts.

Sun gear holder assembly

The sun gear needed to be bolted into the rotor, and have a bearing installed that interfaces between the rotor and the back housing.  That bearing interface had a similarly poor tolerance as the interior interface from last time, and thus the bearing needed to be pressed on.  I had pressed one on as part of verifying that it would work at all, but then didn’t realize that the bolts to installed the holder to the rotor wouldn’t actually fit down.  I ended up grinding a flat on each bolt so that it could fit around the bearing.

Front housing

The front housing is slightly different than my original plan.  I was initially going to machine the outer housing included into the front housing as one piece.  However, having a shop do that turned out to be prohibitively expensive, both because of the need for a 4th axis, and also because of the depth of the part.  It was looking to be something like $500 per piece at ~20 quantity.  Thus, I simplified it into something that wasn’t very deep, didn’t need more than 3 axes, and had just the attachments necessary to maintain a rigid drive train.  I figured I could for now continue 3d printing the outer housing.

That said, the front housing still has a lot attached to it.  The output bearing fits in the central hole, the internal gear rests on the interior of the cylindrical protrusion, the stator rests on the outer surface of the cylindrical protrusion, and the outer housing bolts to outer recessed holes.  Additionally, in the future, the position sensing board will fit into the end of the cylindrical protrusion.

The internal gear ended up closer to a slip fit, which meant I needed to use retaining compound if it was going to serve any practical purpose.  That would also mean it would be really annoying to remove.  Fortunately, I did manage to install the output bearing before using retaining compound on the internal gear, as it does need to be installed first.  However, I didn’t manage to install retaining compound on the output bearing, which wasn’t exactly a slip fit, but did press out easily with my hands.  That would come back to bite me a bit later on.

My next, relatively minor problem, occurred when I was test fitting the stator in place.  That surface was within tolerance, however, the front housing still required cooling with an upside down duster before the stator could be installed easily.  I got overly excited and installed it before having the outer housing installed, so had to take it off again.  Then, after I had installed it again the second time, I realized I had not aligned the stator so that the phase wires lined up in the proper location on the outer housing.  That, I just let slip, which turned out to be fine, since I had to tear it all apart later anyhow.

Gear train

Next up, I installed the planet output shaft bearing.  It was a very loose fit, so retaining compound was used, and possibly applied too sloppily as evidenced later.  Also up were the planet gear shafts, bearings, planet gears with 3d printed bushing adapters, and the planet input with input bearing installed.  Those all came together fine.

Next I installed the rotor which had the sun gear holder attached.  It seemed to mostly fit, and looked like the rotor and stator would clear, so I got excited and super-glued the position sensing magnet onto the end of the sun gear holder.  That way I’d be all set to power up the controller.  Yeah, right, if only it were that easy!

Next up, my challenges in getting the rotor and stator aligned…