Tutorial Diagnostic and hardware help

Wow its kinda wild you revived this thread, becuase I've been creeping on it the last couple days and did a complete re-read of it last night. I just took it to my second annual event and its still problematic.

Last year before the event I disconnected the motor arms and let the seat move freely about its u-joint, and had a friend help me find the position on the slider and where I was able to maintain the best balance with the least amount of shifting. However, I've since added the cheapest plastic shifter I could find and a handbuilt handbrake to the mix, so it may need to be re-evaluated.

The problems persist; the motor drivers, usually the left one, just dies sometimes. I had it die with no one sitting in it, just running it on idle for 10-15 minutes. I say "die", I mean the motor just shuts down and the motion controller requires full reboot and sometimes unplugging and plugging back in to the PC to regain control, as well as manually moving the arm back to within the range of movement, otherwise it sees it as over extended and wont turn the motors on.

I reached down and felt the heatsinks during one shut down and if i recall correctly, felt that the motor that was still working had a warm heatsink on its driver, where the heatsink on the dead one was cold to the touch, and so idk if the super neat cooling mod I saw on the forums for these BTS/IBT-2 style drivers would help me or not. Strongly considering a Sabertooth or Cytron dual 60 amp controller if I cant get these working well. The other side motor driver DOES sometimes fail but not nearly as often as the other one.