Shopsmith Forums

Anybody ever do any work on their feeder motor. I am assuming that it is a DC motor attached to a gear box. Mine is working fine but is starting to make a lot of noise. I took it off of the planer and both infeed and outfeed rollers are turning fine. Ran the feeder motor by itself and it is definitely the feeder motor making the noise. Sounds like it is coming from gear box. Since I don't want to replace the feeder motor and don't want to burn up the control box if the feeder motor completely tanks. Does anybody have any advice?

Thanks,

Forum member gpmark moved the work-in-progress documentation to:

http://beasleymhb.home.comcast.net/~beasleymhb/SPU.pdf

Current state:

Motor Upgrade at 70%
Controller Mods at 0%
New Feed Motor Controller at 0%

Comments and suggestions would be appreciated!

This was previously discussed in this Maintenance and Repair section.

The latest version (2) of his document is

http://beasleymhb.home.comcast.net/~beasleymhb/SPU2.pdf

Well I took the feeder motor apart and found out that one of the two permanent magnets had come lose. Armature has been damaged a little but overall looks to be not in bad shape. Luckily I didn't let it run long when I noticed it was getting noisy. Everything else about the motor looks to be in great shape. I think that I will try some industrial grade JB Weld to re-attach the magnet to the metal casing. Hopefully that will buy me another twenty years before I have to figure something else out. Thanks gregf and billmayo for sending me the information on a possible upgrade. If I lose this motor in the future or cannot get it to run after I have taken it apart I will attempt this upgrade.

The magnet coming lose may be a sign of other problems. Check the motor windings for any burning smell and signs of discoloration. If so your motor is on the quick path to destruction.

The problem is that the original controller is archaic and does not do pulse width modulation like most modern controllers do. That means that at lower speeds your motor tries to draw more current to compensate. And most of us spend most of the time with the speed set at lower settings. You may be able to get more time out of your motor by putting a decent controller on it.

Bill mentioned I'm working on a project to upgrade both the feed motor and the controller. Your welcome to take a look at what I've done so far.

I ending up re-attaching the magnet with some two-part Loctite that was supposedly good up to 300 degrees F. I ran it for a couple of hours the last two weekends and seems to be running fine. Again I didn't see any other damage to the motor besides what was caused when the magnet came loose. There was no burning smell on the motor, bearings were still in great shape so hopefully I will not have any more trouble with it in the near future.

Thanks for everybody's comments!!!!

Alan Loibl

Alan Loibl

Did you ever get your feeder motor problems worked out? I am nearby in Round Rock and my feeder motor has the bottom "button" knocked off and gone, along with the brush and spring. If I can find a salvage, non working feeder motor, I can get my stand-alone planer back up and working. Anyone else chime in. I can not find a local motor repair shop willing to even try JBWeld-ing another cap and brush on!