The geartrain is holding just fine, it is so light that there is not that much strain on things so nothing will break, but I'm sure it will cause premature wear in the diff but that is easaly fixed. The first thing we do with the blizzard is get bearings in it, that is a must then loosen those tracks up a bit. That will free everything up a bunch, you should be able to grab one track and give it a spin and it should keep spinning for another revolution or so then I set the punch control so the power dont hit so hard. Also these tracks do spin on the snow a little and that makes thing easy on the gears. My steering was also real fast and it made the machine a little twitchy so I turned down the servo speed (using my airtronics m11 radio) and that solved that.