pedzola

For anyone who has read my prior threads you know I've been struggling a little bit with my first tank. Nothing wrong with the tank (a Torro KV2), and I've definitely gotten excellent service from Imex, but I had maybe some unrealistic expectations regarding scale speed/performance. The stock gearboxes are too fast, and even with an electronics upgrade (IBU2 Pro), I've been unable to get the low speed torque I've been looking for.

So I scoured the internet, seeking out the rarest gearboxes on the planet, so I could get the best slow-speed tanking I can get.

Thus begins my first review of several gearboxes to come, none of which are currently available from US retailers, and only one of which is designed explicitly to fit my tank...


The first to arrive is the WALTERSONS STEEL 3-SPEED GEARBOX!

Stock photo:



I ordered model #622010, described on the tankzone website (where I purchased the unit) as such:
"All New Steel Gears with Fitting Plate & 22mm Drive Shafts Suitable for Torro/Taigen Tiger 1 & Sturmtiger with metal chassis"


Note that tankzone is the only English-language website that I can find with any info at all on these gearboxes. If Waltersons is trying to market and sell them, they're doing a poor job. I contacted Kin at Tankzone and asked if these would work for my KV2. He recommended that they would not. Well, I took a risk and ordered them anyway.

Benefits of this design:

• "5:1" ratio.
• 380 size motors
• Steel gears
• Replaceable pinions in case you change your mind about driving very slow. (Though note that you need to remove the gearboxes in order to change the pinions).

Here is my photo:




INSTALLATION:

Installing these in my KV2 was unpleasant, at best. The mounting plate that comes with the boxes doesn't fit in any way.

What was required was to modify the existing motor mount in order to mount these new gearboxes. What I did was..

1) Test fit the gearboxes and mark the mounting plate.
2) Drill holes in the mounting plate.
3) Glue nuts to the bottom side of the plate, so that I can screw the plate down with bolts from above.
4) Rinse and repeat. (I screwed up one hole the first time).

The biggest pain - getting the holes in exactly the right place. Turns out the sprocket alignment for the KV2 is pretty tricky. You can be too close to a road wheel, be out of alignment in general, or be catching on the little arm that goes between the sprocket (some kind of mud catcher? I dunno what it is...).

In any case, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth I got the gearboxes mounted. This is not a direct swap for those of you who are not mechanically inclined. My office (temporary workshop) is a disaster right now.

I assume though, that if you have a Tiger or Sturmtiger, the replacement mounting plate would work fine, and you could have these installed very quickly without any of the trouble. For a KV1 or KV2 however, you are on your own as there is no appropriate mounting plate on the market currently.


THE FIT:

They fit. I'm able to close the lid of my tank w/no problem. So, that's it I guess. THEY FIT! And they WORK too.


PERFORMANCE:

All I can say is FINALLY!

They seem to be a little noisier than the stock gearbox, but otherwise they give me what I'm looking for. I was able to scale up the power-motor-scale on my IBU2 pro to 90%, and the tank is slower than with 60% power on the stock 3-speed box.

I can finally.....

Crawl over obstacles at very low speed (plenty of torque).
Turn on carpet with no problems whatsover.
Turn on carpet with super-spin entirely disabled! (1 track spins, the other is stationary, the tank pivots).

This is all I wanted out of my tank from the beginning. So I'm pretty happy.

It will be difficult for me to swap to the other gearboxes when they arrive, since I don't really want to tear down my tank again. But I have at least one box that will blow this one out of the water if I can get it to work.

It's still a month out, so I will post when I get it.


In the meantime I'm going to do w/my tank what God intended.... drive over stuff.



SUMMARY:

I've spend several hours installing these and only a few minutes driving so far, so I can't tell you they are the greatest and most reliable gearboxes in the world. But they appear to work just fine, and I'm very happy with the performance.

If you look around the web you may come across one of the scant few references to a Waltersons gearbox that says the drive shaft is out of alignment (wobbles). Not the case with mine. Seems very solid.

Also, I had a good experience w/TankZone. You may not receive much in the way of communication after your order, but I had the box from the UK to New Hampshire in about 3 weeks.

kizwan

Thank you for the review. Yeah, I'm eyeing Waltersons gearboxes at tankzone too & I'm also disappointed that you can't click at the product to view/read information about it. The only place to get the information of the gearbox is by going to Waltersons website but that also contains only brief information. Anyway, that's look like a good quality gearbox. I'm interested with this gearbox after reading about it somewhere. I have talked with one guy who use Waltersons gearbox but I don't know whether he is using the brass or steel. He upgraded to 480 motor I think, pretty sure 400 series motor. It does have a lot of power when climbing.

BTW, can you adjust the final drive gear?

pedzola

I don't think you can move the final drive gear.


UPDATE:
I've been driving around w/these gears for about an hour. One of them is much noisier than the other. Upon investigating, the gearbox is not rubbing on anything, but seems to hit a rough patch in the rotation every now and then. I can't really pinpoint it. Doesn't seem to really affect performance. I did find a broken-off gear tooth on one of the larger gears, but it is not what is causing the problem. Not sure if the gear came broken or if I did it. In any case, not super thrilled to find that, but doesn't seem to affect performance at all.

If I figure out what is making the extra noise and "stickiness" on one side I will let everyone know.



UPDATE 2: IT BROKE!

After the aforementioned hour of driving, I lost a sprocket and decided I probably just needed some loctite. Also decided to take those extra links back out. So I went to work... and all seemed well after these changes.

But then I took the tank top off to inspect the rest of the gearboxes. I noticed that one of the tracks had more play than the other, and as I was wiggling it I saw a piece of metal fall off the final drive gear! >__<

The final drive gear is held on by a set screw. The part of the gear w/the set screw simply fell apart. The screw was still in there, though it came right out of course.

Pictures of the destruction below.... this is just ~1 hour of normal driving. Maybe even less. I certainly was not beating on it, nothing I can think of that would cause any undue stress on the drivetrain.




So I guess I will try to contact TankZone and/or Waltersons and see what can be done. I just hope it doesn't take months to get a replacement.

The good news I guess is that I should have another different gearbox in my hands next week... so the gearbox hunt continues...

Panther G

Set screw would have to have been over tightened to cause that. not that that's what you did. It may have had a hair loine crack in the gear and even a little too much torque on the set screw would cause the gear to break out like that.

pedzola

I didn't touch the set screw, so it must have come like that.

In any case, frustrating. Will post here when I figure out if I am going to be able to get a replacement, etc.

kizwan

Oh my! Does the gearbox now completely unusable?

pedzola

Yes, completely unusable, unfortunately. Without that set screw on the final drive gear, the sprocket is free-spinning. So after all the hard work to fit these gearboxes to my tank, I only got an hour or less of driving out of it!

I emailed TankZone earlier today. Hoping to hear back early in the week and find out what my options are.

kizwan

They probably can send you the final drive shaft only.

jarndice

rc tankwarfare have "TANKZONE" on their blacklist, and there are some story's of shortcomings and a lack of back up that would cause me to think twice about dealing with them. shaun

olegnA

The next time you install a new gearbox, try adjusting the IBU2 Pro INI file (if it is the same with IBU2 base?).

Try tweaking the values in the following until you get a 'compromised' result:
CurrentMotorThreshold=10 (default 15)
PowerRotation=40 (default 50)
PowerMotorScale=80 (default 100)

I have 2 Taigen airsoft and they have different range of values in their IBU2 board.

Max-U52

Hard to tell in those photos, but that does not look like high quality steel. It looks very, very porous, and that's bad. I'd expect zinc gears to look like that when broken. I really appreciate the review, though, and I won't get any of those boxes now. Like you said, the gearbox hunt continues.

Max-U52

double post

pedzola

So I sent Kin at Tankzone an email over the weekend and he responded early this morning. He offered a replacement drive shaft as Kizwan above had suggested. Apologized for the problem and asked if I would send the broken parts back for inspection after I receive the replacement part. So hopefully this was just a fluke and the next one holds up better. I was very happy w/the speed and power of the gearboxes.

At the end of the day I will probably put them on a different tank, we'll see. Will take some pictures of the replacement process when I get the new parts.

Happy w/the customer service so far.

sergeantseabass

Well I'm glad to hear that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for you on this. I hope they work great for you.

pedzola

Well I am happy to say that I received my replacement drive shaft (actually a pair of them) from Tankzone yesterday.

Unfortunately, they included ONLY the drive shafts. As you can see from the pictures, the shaft is not the broken part, it's the final drive gear. I emailed again last night, hopefully they are still willing to work with me on this.

Since it looks like either way I will be out a gearbox for another couple weeks at minimum, I had the bright idea that I could use some JB Weld epoxy to put the parts back together!

Step 1 - clean the parts.

As I was removing the drive shaft, one of the ball bearings holding the shaft disintegrated in my hand. It cracked in half and fell apart with little balls all over the place.

So... that was the end of that project. I now need a replacement bearing AND a new final drive gear...

I am really starting to regret this purchase.

I hope I can get this side back in working condition eventually, but at the end of the day I'll probably have another gearbox in hand by the time this is fixed.


Speaking of other gearboxes - the new one that I was hoping to review last week is apparently stuck in US customs. No tracking update for almost 3 weeks now. In my research I've found that customs can hold packages without notifying you for up to 45 days, and it can be up to 8 weeks or more before they are released.

The customs website has tips for people buying online from other countries. Here is the abbreviated version: Don't do it. They also have an FAQ about how to find your missing package. Summary: Don't call Customs.

Super unhelpful, and super frustrating. I guess I've been very lucky ordering my IBU2 and these gearboxes from UK, as I've had no delays in receiving them.

My first order from Germany is looking to take weeks longer than expected.

Now I hope my package from Russia shows up... ever.

My # complaint about tanking is still that there are no exceptional US dealers. Why do we have to order from Europe, Asia, and Australia to get the parts we want?

Will update if I ever get these waltersons gearboxes fixed... would like to reiterate that despite the negative reviews online I'm receiving perfectly reasonable service from tankzone so far. Unfortunately, I just shouldn't have to be going through this.

Captain Nemo12

I've heard about gears breaking apart under strain but never bearings disintegrating, really makes me wonder what kind of crappy materials they used in this gearbox and how they tried to pass it as a quality product. If I were you I would just ask for a refund instead of a replacement, if TankZone does refunds that is. I really hope everything works out for you, at the end of the day the tried-and-true HL and Taigen steel gearboxes might be your best bet.

I'm staying away from Waltersons products in the future.

FreakyDude

I dropped the Walterson gearboxes because they are junk. The gears themselves are cast, not cut or ground and if the tooth edges don't break off then the area around the threaded grub screws will crack and allow the grub screw to wiggle a big chunk of metal out eventually allowing the grub screw to come completely out.
Anybody buying the steel/metal gear boxes will be sorry they did. The brass gear boxes are still decent and available but overall the walterson experience for me was a bad one

kizwan

That's bad. I was planning to get the brass one because a couple of people I talked to that use walterson brass gearbox didn't complain anything about the gearbox. They even use 400 series motor with it. However, the bad quality of the steel gearbox is enough for me to stay away from walterson gearbox. Until recently, I don't know that walterson also produced steel gears.

pinky_waltersons

Dear Pedzola

We are terribly sorry about the problem you are encountering with the driveshaft gear. As soon as we discovered the issue, we have designed a new driveshaft gear profile, please check out the following picture:



Would you please PM us with your full address? and we will send you back 2 sets of new driveshaft gear free of charge.
The majority of our resources have been alocated to the new 1/72 scale Rc tank project, and therefore we are not able to design a more robust drivetrain. But in early 2016, we will definitely release a new version because it will be fitted with our new tanks.



Yours sincerely,

Pinky
Waltersons Industry Ltd.

pedzola

First, just want to say Thank You to Waltersons for reaching out on the forum. It is obvious that you care about product quality and customer service by doing so.

The new final drive gear looks good! I will send a PM.

Lastly, I also want to say Thank You to Kin from TankZone UK. I did receive a replacement set from him, and have had no trouble dealing with TankZone at all. I wouldn't hesitate to buy there again.

I have not installed the replacement set yet, but I do think the layout of this gearbox is exactly what is needed for several of the tanks out there. Having a lower gear ratio while retaining the 380 motors and a low enough profile is critical. I will be very happy w/these gearboxes if the final drive gears hold up this time.

Tanque

If that broken gear was any sort of steel or even iron I would have silver brazed it back together and re-tapped the set screw hole to get going again.

Jerry

pinky_waltersons

Hello Pedzola, you are very welcome! we have received your PM message.
We have tested the new final drive gear and it is definitely strong enough to hold itself with the stainless steel driveshaft.

pedzola

Quick update on this. I received the new final drive gears from Waltersons, and they were also kind enough to throw in a pair of long drive shafts so I can try the gearboxes on my Taigen metal-hulled Jagdpanther. Unfortunately, the gearbox doesn't fit in the JP. The good news is that the new gears are beefy, probably twice the bulk of the originals. I can't see breaking these.

Now I just need to find a tank to put these gears into!

Max-U52

I'll be more than happy to put them in my King Tiger, just send 'em up here!

Tanque

No gearbox is going to be indestructible. The forces at work when in operation are clearly exceptional. Thin, weakly
made parts won't last long no matter what the material. Poor tolerances don't help.

Hard steel small ball bearings aren't at their best in applications where there's shock
involved or significant lateral stress. My large tank gearboxes use bronze bearings for the final
drive; more resistant to breakage. I've not been a fan of all the ball bearing upgrades for every
aspect of a tank. Some are good and appropriate but in my opinion not all.

Again, in my opinion, a properly engineered model tank gearbox ( for a 1/16 scale model)
would be quite costly. Like anything you should get what you pay for.

Jerry