Installing A VFD/VSD On A Drill Press

[nova_robotics]

I have never done it, but I assume you could somehow run a universal motor off of a VFD. I imagine that would not be very good thing for either the motor or the VFD, nor the best way to vary the speed of single phase motor.

Yes! You can! It actually doesn't make much of a difference to the motor. The universal motor will just happily continue chugging along as if nothing changed as you adjust the frequency up and down. You're probably right about it beating up the snubbers in the VFD. If you could somehow get in there and reprogram the microcontroller on one of those consumer level VFDs I bet you could get it to do PWM for speed control simultaneously on three different motors. That might be an interesting project.