Brushed motor maintenance advice?
 

Can anyone advise if I am just running it in my garden and the street, how much life am I going to get before I need to worry about changing brushes or any other maintenance. At the moment I quite like it. It seems pretty smooth, and responsive.
Most of my experience so far with 1/10th scale has been with brushless. However, after some recent speedo problems, I’m now running an old brushed motor in my B4. A stock 27T.

as long as its not over geared and doesnt get to hot running continueous packs through it should be ok for a while, they only need regular service when racing due to the heat from maxing everything out if you arent they should be ok

Can you give me any idea of the number of hours running I might get from a brushed motor then before I need to change the brushes?

thats a tough question never timed how long they last, tbh you used to be able to get endurance brushes which were good for 24hour races and such but where you would pick some up i dont know i may have some but cannot promise anything, normal brushes were rated by how many runs you could do some of the high performance were 2-3 packs then needed change so around 15minutes for those others were 10-20 packs you get the idea you want hard brushes which wont wear out fast, obviously the comm will still need to be cut though or that will cause wear as well hth

If you are just bashing around, there is no need to replace the brushes until you start having motor trouble. Probably you will get a "sticky brush" at some time (which is where the car refuses to get going unless you give it a push), that is a sure fire sign that the motor needs a rebuild.

If the motor is running fairly hard brushes (not the racing brushes designed for only a handful of runs) you should get a good few hours of use out of the motor before it causes you any trouble.

To get any benefit from a brush change the comm needs to be skimmed on a lathe as well. Otherwise the out-of-shape comm will just burn through the next set of brushes quickly.

Brushed motors still have a place in the hobby. They are smooth, driveable and cheap to buy. But I wouldn't personally bother running a rebuildable motor now, specific brushes are going to be a hassle to find. I'd just buy sealed can motors at less than £10 a pop and run them until they die (which is generally a lot longer than a rebuildable motor will go before it needs new brushes).

Well, I have a brushless set up too, but it's in my other buggy (Durga) for now. These brushed motors only cost me £2 each, and I will just keep going with them for now and see what happens!