You most certainly CAN reverse a single phase motor. On some motors the connections are brought out to make it simple, on others you would need to dig a bit.
My lathe has a 1 HP single phase cap start motor that can be started in either direction.
Almost any single phase induction motor will run backwards if spun fast enough backwards before power is applied
On 1/15/2009 8:07 AM Robatoy mumbled something about the following:
Shredded wheat and milk through the nose is painful. Oh, and you owe me a keyboard.
So uh, while my answer may have seemed like a wise ass answer, if you took my suggestion would it accomplish what you are trying to do? Having use a RAS for 5 or 6 years to build probably half the furniture in my house and used lots of attachments on it, I have never needed to make the motor spin in the opposite direction in which it was wired to do. Why do you need to reverse the spin on yours?
I have been experimenting with this:
A chip deflector and a scrub brush anti-kickback.
I am also working on a mechanical hold down.
Just having fun and games,
What I intended was to swap the wires to the two brushes (this is easy to describe, there are other rewirings that would accomplish the same thing). Because the brushes activate the ROTOR magnetization, the swap would reverse the rotor poles without changing the other magnetic part, the STATOR. That accomplishes the reversal of a brush-type (universal) motor.
Think of the (temporary N) pole on the rotor, pulled clockwise; if you make it instead a (temporary S) pole, the attraction becomes repulsion and the motor goes counterclockwise.
Swapping the wall socket polarity would reverse both rotor and stator fields, so has no effect on rotation direction.
Repurposing the motor for an old Bell Saw planer router. Need a counter clockwise rotation. Wondering if switching the leads on the starter relay will reverse the polarity. Haven’t worked up the nerve to try it yet.
Through gearing yes, electrically nope.
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