Pool Blaster Vac Water Tech Repair Summary Battery Motor Charger

[lantanaman]

This tread is a summary of how to fix and repair common problems with the Pool blaster battery powered vac. I am a busy guy so please forgive me if I do not post up all the info at once. I went through the process of fixing my vac read some other treads here and here is my summary.

Problem #1A Inferior stock battery
Solution: Replace it with aftermarket battery of greater capacity.

The most common problem is battery failure. This failure will keep the unit from running. If yesterday your vac was working and today it is not chances are its the battery.

The battery failure problem is actually a symptom of a cheap charger. Due to the chemistry of the battery (nickel metal hydrite) the charging of this type of battery is more prone to more failures (over charging) than other chemistries such as Lithium polymer or Nicd. So to charge these batteries right you need a good charger. A good chager is Problem 1b. My solution is to use an RC type of charger. But first things first here is how and where to get a new battery.

Problem 1a Solved First pic is the new battery Second pic is new verse the old for comparison sake.

 

[lantanaman]

Problem 1b
The reason the battery gets fried is due to a poor/cheap/inferior charger.
There is a couple of solutions to this. Best and Good

Best is to use an RC charger by modifying the charge cord to work.

Good is this charger here
http://www.cheapbatterypacks.com/product/1028/Simple-Nimh-Charger-5-8-cells.aspx

The solution I choose was to use my RC charger and retrofit the charge cord to it.

The challenge with making this work is finding the positive and negative lead on the wires.
The positive is striped. See second photo

 

[lantanaman]

Here is a picture of my RC charger charging the Pool Blaster.


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I can not upload any more pictures.
I am getting an error message that I have gone over my quota. Please help.
How can I fix this to continue to post pics in this thread?

 

[lantanaman]

Problem #2 is the motor.
The stock motor works fine.
But why not have the best while you have it all apart?
My stock motor was a little corrode and was showing signs of age.

So I tried using this motor and it was a fail.
http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXUU50&P=7


Why did the new motor not work?
The gear mesh was too tight (even though I bought a correct sized gear) and it fried my new motor.
I bought the same type of gear that was on the old motor and put it on the new motor.
The gear is an 18Tooth 48pitch gear with 1/8th inch shaft.
But a replacing it will not work.
The correct solution is to pull the old gear and put it on the new motor.

So why did I just not pull the old gear off the old motor and put it on the new motor?
You need a special tool to overcome the challenge of pulling the old gear off. The special tool you need is called a pinion gear puller.

It is cheaper and easier to buy an new gear than buy the tool and pull the old gear off, so I went the route of buying a new gear and it failed.

So other TFP members please feel free to chime in here to share your experience with pulling the old gear off and using it on a new motor. As I have not done this. I was able to use my old motor with new battery and RC charger to complete my repair. But I am wondering if any one has
put a new motor on and used the old or new gear on a new motor.


Also please note that I did get so far as to hook up this motor and run it to verify its rotation direction being correct.
It is correct and is compatible.