So I found this old shredder in my garage, I plugged it in and the thing was jammed. So I opened it up and the motor was literally attached to a metal plate with gears on it and at the very end it spun the blades. Then I ripped off the blades and I was left with the motor and some gears. To my amazement the gears meshed with the vex gears!! So I spent about 1 hour turning this thing into something useful.
The motor is 1.2amps AC current so the vex cannot drive it directly but I have 4 x 40amp 120v relays. So I could hook the vex up to the relay, then you could turn the relay on. It would only be 1 way but if I hooked up all four relays I could do multi direction control.
I am not sure but judging from my sight when compared to a vex motor it looks as if its between 150 to 200rpm with an awesome amount of torque. I put the wrench on the axle and I had to really try to stall the motor so the torque is great.
I just don’t feel like programming the encoder and testing it right now.
I bet that If you geared this right you could get it up to 1000rpm with a decent amount of torque.
As for changing the direction, I don’t think reversing the polarity on the motor works for AC motors. But that switch that you can see in the pictures is able to make the motor go forward and back manually.
I believe what you have there is a “Universal Motor” rather than an AC motor. That means it’ll run on either AC or DC. The brushes and the lack of a starting capacitor are the giveaway.
I have no idea how much DC voltage you’d need to get it to go, but it might be happy enough with something in the 48V range (several Vex batteries in series?). Not convenient, but at least it opens up the option of using this in a mobile robot.
A fairly simple circuit (much like a light dimmer) can be used to control the speed. With a bit of wiring and programming, you can even get the Vex to control the speed.
I have many more motors to, for $20 I got a 5hp compressor motor that was supposedly “Broken” at Tractor Supply. Then about 30 minutes later I had the thing running great, turns out it was just a couple wires that slipped.
I also think the mini 12v compressors from walmart have some nice motors, mine broke so I took it apart and its about the size of 4 C batterys. Its only $10 so it might be worth it to buy it and disassemble it just for the motor. But it pulls 8 amps so it might be hard to get a small battery pack to run the thing.
I had an “Edison Electronic Voicewriter”, that would run on AC or DC. It had some Weights on some Metal Springs to control the RPM, a Physical Governor. Now lost to a house fire.
I still have some Wire Recorders at my Parents House…
just recently my brother took apart my little brothers powerwheeles i got the motor and removed it from the gear box and to find out that the gear on the motor meshes with vex since its from a power wheeles it uses 12v so ill probably just use a drill battery to power it
