I stripped my first set of gears in a motor this weekend. I was goofing around on the driveway showing Artoo to some neighbors across the street when suddenly the dome stopped working. I heard this really bad crunching noise then a very quiet motor spinning.

I quickly pulled him into the workshop and the dome off to see what was up.

A couple of months ago I had lined the inside track of my dome bearing with some batting tape to help the dome wheel grip. It had been slipping and the resulting noise was very annoying. The tape seemed to be the perfect solution …… until the gearbox failed.

I think what had happened was I’d left R2 sitting in the van all day and when I finally unloaded him the glue on the tape had heated up and when I started to spin the dome it balled up – jamming the wheel and breaking the gearbox.

Gerard had a similar failure trying to fix the squeaky slipping wheel. He’d over tightened the tension spring which stopped the dome the moment the motor stopped – but again this put extra pressure on the gears in the Pittman motor causing them to fail.

So for now I’m back to having a squeaky dome.