"V" for Victory?

Radio Control Car Action, Apr 2004 by Pond, Steve

Orion Revolution V2 Modified

Orion is one of the few major players in the competition electric motor market that actually makes its own motors. Many other motor companies simply finish the assembly by wrapping the wire around the armature and balancing and packaging, etc., but Orion has the can, armature and endbell made to its specifications. Being one of such an elite group of manufacturers gives Orion the freedom to be particularly creative and innovative with its motor designs. The latest proof of this comes in the form of the new Revolution Modified motors. They are 540 mills and legal for all forms of racing, but they sport a radical new endbell design that isn't like anything ever before strapped to the top of an RC car motor.

REVOLUTION MODIFIED

The Revolution Modifieds are Orion's newest premium racing motors. They replace the Core series as Orion's best hand-wound modifieds, and they will powerTeam Orion's drivers in competitions around the world in the upcoming season.

The lineup includes a diverse selection of winds, and there are four motor series: Modified, Steenari, Touring and Hara. The Steenari and Hara motors are named after world-champion drivers Jukka Steenari and Atsushi Hara. Each series is slightly tweaked to have subtle performance-characteristics differences from the others, so they aren't merely re-stickered motors.

FEATURES

* New aluminum endbell design

* Angled brush orientation

* Pure copper brush tubes

* Round brushes and brush springs

* Factory-installed capacitors

ARMATURE. This looks like standard mod-motor issue: it has a solid web and a full crown on the laminations. The Revolution motors have armatures with webbing of varying thicknesses to fine-tune performance; motors with thicker armature webbing produce more rpm; motors with thinner webbing produce more torque. The Modified line has a thicker webbing for better 2WD off-road performance, while the Touring, Hara and Steenari lines have thinner webs for more punch on the high-traction conditions of 4wd off-road and touring car racing.

MOTOR CAN. The motor can is the same as the Core motor's. It features a matte-black finish and four, big vents in the bottom that extend to the outside, so they'll allow a cooling airflow even when the can is mounted on a flat surface. Four angled vents are punched into each side of the can, and they allow a little breathing between the magnets. The Revolution is fitted with Orion's "G14" wet magnet, which the company says is its strongest magnet to date.

The motor label has timing marks to help you correctly dial in the timing after regular motor maintenance or a rebuild, but the spacing of the timing marks is a little awkward. Each mark equals about 5.75 degrees of timing-just shy of 23 degrees for the whole scale. The marks are more for reference than for measuring actual degrees of timing; 20 degrees is about halfway between the last two marks, and that's a good place to start with any motor that has more than 9 turns.

ENDBELL This is pretty different from anything we've seen so far. We've seen aluminum endbells before, but the V2's design and features are unique. The brush hoods are pure copper tubes, and they're installed in the endbell at an angle. This means that the round brushes contact the commutator at an angle. Brushes installed like this resist the "brush bouncing" that we see with standard brushes that are installed at 90 degrees to the commutator. As a result, the brush springs don't have to be as strong, so less power is lost to friction caused by the contact between the brush and commutator.

The copper brush tubes are installed in the endbell without insulation, and that keeps brush temps lower than in a conventional motor.

Finally, the angle of the brush tubes ensures a larger contact surface area than with a conventional motor, so the Revolution motors benefit from a large contact area with a smaller brush.

Orion was the first to bring us factory-installed capacitors in its Chrome motors, but they had only two capacitors and not the three that are recommended. The new Revolution endbell has three surface-mounted capacitors on its underside. Only the wires from the speed control have to be soldered to the motor. A few words of caution related to soldering the motor wires: you need a particularly hot iron because the aluminum endbell draws a lot of heat from the brush tubes. This benefits performance, but it increases the risk of your having a "cold" solder joint that harms performance, and it may result in the motor leads coming off it. It's a great "problem" to have because it means that the brushes will be very cool during operation, but you absolutely must make a good solder joint when you install the motor.

BRUSHES. The Revolution motors' highly innovative brushes are round instead of rectangular. Orion says that this "... allows smoother brush overlap, resulting in less arcing, which increases performance and reduces the likelihood of radio interference." They're smaller than conventional brushes, but they're installed at about a 45-degree angle and that creates a contact area that's about as large as that of a standard brush. The brushes are inserted into the brush tubes from the inside of the endbell. The brush tubes extend well inside the endbell so there's very little gap between them and the commutator. This leaves less room for the brushes to vibrate.