HI guys!
i got a new video camera that i am playing with so i can upload some video shots soon. still waiting for my machine shop parts again, seems i found anouther shop that likes to put me on the back burner. in the meantime i found that i have several old weedwacker motors so i went ahead and chopped up the old rotor in one of those and got it up and running on the basic circuit. i even used the old copper brushes modified with a little fingernail polish to dial in the ontime windows but my oscope shot on that switch looked pretty "noisy" so now i have a reed switch on it, this gives me a much cleaner shot. also playing with my first motor with the optical switch, for curiosity, i added a reed switch in series with the recieving phototransistor and got some pretty amazing results..... but... now it appears that maybe one of my transistors is failing partially. because my motor spontaniously shuts down for 3 to 5 seconds almost like something is overheating, tuning down the voltage on the led in the opto switch seems to improve the problem, so i am curious if anybody knows what might be causing the damage? to the phototransistor? here is the original circuit. it doesnt have the reed switch added on to it. r2-r5 are 100ohm and r6 and r7 are 300ohm the PSU is actually only running around 25v not the 60v listed thats just a max voltage



thanks!
Eric