Stuffing the magic smoke back in...

[John Rumm]

An old friend finally gave up, here is the story of its restoration to health:

[Tricky Dicky]

Refreshing to see something in this line that is repairable in an era where most things seem to be "throw away" or simply not cost effective to repair.

Richard

[Brian-Gaff]

Almost anything could be repaird of course, but eh maker o

[cl]

I have two mains machines with failed armature windings that I would love to fix.

In one case (a Bissell vacuum cleaner) the replacement motor is no longer obtainable even though it's only a few years old. No chance of just getting an armature.

In the other case (a Ryobi strimmer) a replacement motor is available but it costs just about the same as a complete new strimmer.

Is there no one anywhere offering a rewind service for this type of small armature? I'd guess there's pretty generic machinery for doing the winding as there are zillions of these little motors around. I'd happily pay £25 to £35 for such a repair as both machines are good enough in other ways to want to preserve them.

[fred]

I dropped a Makita battery and the bottom half of the casing came adrift. I t had been glued in place. Having little faith in re-glueing it I riveted i t back together. (Because the cover was hexagonal and the battery pack was round there was room for a rivet in the corners.) Still going strong

[Nightjar]

Google gets a number of hits, although the company I used to use does not appear to be among them. This company looks as though it knows what it is doing, but I have no personal experience of them:

IME, rewinds are only economic if there really is no alternative motor available, as with a surface grinding machine I had, where the motor casing was part of the main machine casting.

[Huge]

[13 lines snipped]

[cl]

Thanks for the link, I'd tried Google searches but it's very difficult to decide if a particular company can/will rewind small armatures, most (not unreasonably) seem to only do big motors.

Quite, I'd replace the motor/machine if it was more economical or possible.

What sort of ball-park figure would you expect for the cost of a rewind?

[newshound]

Oh and I thought for a minute there you were going to show us an armature rewind!

When I worked in an industrial research lab, we had a guy who could do this. I don't know if he ever did them for "work" but you could take him a car dynamo or just about anything else.

Come to think of it, there were people there who could mend anything! Several superb welders, a glassblower, etc.

[Nightjar]

On 03/07/2015 11:16, [e-mail] wrote: ...

Long time since I had it done, but IIRC, it was about 50% dearer than buying a new 3 phase industrial motor of the same power. It was a lot cheaper than buying a new surface grinder though.

[John Rumm]

Not at £26 for a shiny new one!

(there is a local motor service place I have used before, but I doubt they could match that price...)

[News]

In message , [e-mail] writes

Yes. Armature rewinding is a large part of 0 gauge and larger old toy train restoration. Two known experts in the UK are Geoff Brown in Lincoln and Nat Donnelly in Manchester, although whether either would be interested in non train items is unknown. The point is, though, that there are people out there with the equipment and expertise. Doubtless there are others in, say, classic cars or similar.

[cl]

For that matter is it possible to hand wind such armatures?

[Capitol]

Yes, they can be handwound, seen it done for a dynamo, IIRC however you need to pass a large current through the finished winding to give the iron some residual magnetism. May be wrong about the latter, can anybody confirm?

[Andrew Gabriel]

I don't know that it needed to be a particularly high current. With car dynamos, you passed a current through whilst gently tapping it with a hammer to shake up the magentic nodes in the metal. Most often this was done if you wanted to change the polarity of the electrical system from +ve chassis to -ve chassis car, which required reversing the output polarity of the dynamo.