Motor Dunking

One of my projects for the last two weeks has been to try to get a little "flipper" motor to work in a vacuum at -196C (liquid N2). I've got to put some calcite in this thing so that I can make an instrument for the infra-red spectrograph. First thing I did was to fill up a styrofoam cup with LN2 and dunk the entire assembly. It froze up. Then I took the motor assembly out and dunked it alone in the cup. That froze up too. Then I took the gear head off the motor and put both of them in acetone and dunked it in an ultrasonic cleaner that took all the grease off of it. The grease was freezing up the motors, so now the motor works dunked, but the gear head didn't. I took that apart and dunked just the gear housing - ok, but when I put the gears back in, it froze. Now I've got to get creative. I think I'll sandblast the gears to try and loosen them up. Or maybe I'll just break it and have to start over...... Anyways, that's been many hours of my last few weeks.


Controller Box, Motor, Holder Assembly.
Gears and housing
Motor and the holder.