Another bag of worms

Bart Leetch

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Clinton, Washington on Whidbey Island
I have received a older free treadmill & taken it apart it has a motor rated at 2.65 HP with a continuous duty of 1.5 HP.

I am looking at this as an interim solution until I get a new lathe & hope to hook it up to run my old Delta double duty lathe.

The motor has a big cast iron flywheel & fan combination on the front. I am thinking it needs this for more then cooling? It also has the 1 1/4" ribbed pulley as an integral part of it. Would it be possible to rig a fan to blow on the motor & then mount a regular V belt pulley? Or does this motor need this as a fly wheel.


I have everything disassembled from the treadmill & re-hooked up & test run on the bench & it all works fine.

I am fine with lower speeds on this lathe so it wouldn't need to crank up to real high speeds 200-1200 would work just fine for me.

Also it there a way to control this system without the great big control panel, say closer to regular rheostat in size? The panel is 6" x 25".

I have figured out how to mount the panel so just what I need to get to will be exposed.

Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome.
 
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I believe the flywheel is necessary as a tread mill so that the braking effect of stepping on the Tread doesn't hesitate the motor (especially at lower speeds. ) I don't think it will be necessary for lathe use.

Is this a DC motor?
 
Like has been said the flywheel is there for the tred mill not needed for what your doing. The controler is the thing that is between wired between the motor and the control panel. that one looks like it get it's spped command crom the counsel and it impossible to tell if you could hook a reostat to it instead of the BICP (big ole controll panel)
 
Quick answer Maybe. What you have is a DC motor so you will have to convert AC to DC and then vary the DC voltage to control the motor speed. How many wires go from the big panel to the little board. I suspect all the bells and whistles end up supplying a low voltage control signal to the actual motor controller. I suspect a low current potentiometer could be wired up for this. If you take a top view picture of the smaller circuit board it may be like the one I have down stairs and I can give you the pin outs. One thing almost all these motor controllers do is when you turn them off you have to take the control voltage down to zero and ramp back up to the speed you want. If you use a pop all that means is turn down and then back up....


In all cases I have seen these motors used a separate rectifier/ control assembly has been used. Surplus center in Nebraska has sold 1000's of these motors over the last few years. Problem is often they have no controllers.

I suppose if you didn't want to control the speed you could just use a diode bridge to get the DC and let it run wide open. Many of these have a tapered shaft where the flywheel is mounted that can make mounting a normal pulley a little difficult.

Searching via google should find several how to's as they have been used to power lathes, mills, Drill presses and other items..

They are workhorses once you get them hooked up. One other thing see the fins on the fly wheel, that is about the only cooling these motors have, if you remove it you should add some other fan. Actually when I reread I see you already noticed the fins.

Garry

PS Studying your picture some more I would guess and it is only a guess from here that the smaller red, white and black wires coming into the board on the right are where you would put your pot/rheostat. I would use a 5 kohm pot and hook one side up to red the other to black and the wiper to white. Anything between a 1k and 10 k should work fine. Are there any labels on those three wires?

Just for info the two blue wires from the motor usually aren't required and go to a thermal switch..
 
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