High-Speed DC Hobby Motor

Bare brushed DC "can" motors in the four sizes that actually matter, from the drop-in 130 up to a 380 that spins to 33,000 RPM. No gearbox and no encoder — this is raw shaft speed for flywheels, launchers, fans, pumps, and anything you will drive through a motor driver and forget about.

Choose the size first

Size is the whole decision on this page. A can motor's number is its physical can, and the can sets how much power it can put into the shaft before it stalls. Bigger can, more power, more current.

One thing the numbers don't tell you: the 130 is a flat-sided can, and the 260, 380 and 385 are all round. Stepping up from a 130 means a new bracket, not just a new motor — worth knowing before you print fifty of the old one.

130 Size — 1.5–12V, 7,600 RPM

The standard small hobby motor: a flat-sided can about 21mm across, the same footprint as almost every toy and kit motor, so it drops straight into existing 130 brackets. It has the widest voltage range here — it will crawl on a single AA and scream on 12V, and that headroom over a plain 3–6V 130 is the whole point of it. Note the dual long shaft: it runs out both ends, which is handy for driving two things, but it will foul a mount with a closed back.

260 Size — 3–6V, 5,500 RPM at 3V / 14,000 RPM at 6V

A step up in power, and a round can rather than the 130's flat-sided one — so it needs its own bracket, not a 130 mount. Roughly double the speed of the 130 on the same 6V battery pack, with the torque to hold it there under load.

380 Size — 3–6V, 17,000 RPM at 3V / 25,000 at 4.5V / 33,000 at 6V

The fast one, and the reason this page exists. A round 380 can on 6V is what flywheel launchers, disc shooters and high-speed fans are built around: it holds its RPM when something heavy hits the wheel instead of collapsing. It draws real current, so give it a battery pack and a proper motor driver rather than a breadboard rail.

385 Size — 12V, 9,800 RPM, 70 g·cm, 3.6W

Physically the largest here — the same 27.7mm can diameter as the 380 but around half again as long, at 27.7 × 60mm — and the only one specified at 12V. Rated 3.6W with 70 g·cm of torque. This is the torque option rather than the speed option: small pumps, drills, grinders and belt drives, rather than spinning something light very fast.

Building a flywheel launcher?

The usual failure is not torque, it is stored energy. A light 3D-printed flywheel dumps all its speed the instant the disc or ball touches it, because there is almost nothing spinning to ride through the impulse. Two fixes, in this order: move mass out to the rim of the wheel, and step the motor up a can size so it recovers RPM between shots. A 380 at 6V is the usual answer — budget for a new bracket, since it is a round can.

Driving them

All four are plain two-wire brushed DC motors: swap the leads to reverse direction, vary the voltage to vary speed. None are safe straight off a logic pin — run them through an H-bridge or a MOSFET driver and give them their own supply. Stall current on the 380 and 385 is easily enough to brown out a microcontroller sharing the same battery, so split the rails and tie the grounds together.

Voltage is the cheapest performance you will ever buy. A brushed DC motor's speed and its stall torque both scale roughly with the volts you feed it, so before you step up a size, check whether you have simply been running the motor you already own below its rating.