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I'm another vote for A/C motors with a chuck. They may become something else but in the meantime, they spin some kind of wheel (large grinding, wooden wheel with sandpaper attached, leather wrapped polisher, sisal, sewn cotton, etc.) That way I don't have to keep changing things around.
Sawtooth - I'm like the rest of you guys. Piles of stuff that can be used for building useful things. I too have a number of the switch types you mentioned as well as various remnant lengths of pipe and fittings. And lots of motors.
First off, the switches. The type you mentioned are most useful with water systems, domestic, swimming pool, irrigation water, solar heating and marine where salt water corrosion isn't a problem. Not much else except perhaps limit switches for motorized motion. They need to be specialized for the use you have in mind if you are dealing with flammable, corrosive or any other hazardous liquid. Be careful there. It may work fine at first and then sometime later burn something down or explode in your face.
Pipe. Galvanized pipe is great for ground contact like posts to support something. Galvanize is a little hazardous to weld because of the zinc fumes. Plain steel, especially thin stuff rusts too fast but welds nicely and paint sticks to it. So building useful structures like tables and fixtures is easier with plain steel. Add a galvanized piece to it and it looks hokey. Heavy wall steel pipe galvanized or not makes good rollers to move heavy stuff on a concrete floor or as cheater handles on tools to get better leverage. Connecting heavy wall pipe together with fittings can be useful for building stuff as long as you are getting the fittings real cheap or for free. But pipe properly welded together is a lot stronger than threaded pile fittings if strength rather than rigidity of the structure is an issue. Note standard water pipes are oddball diameters and if a close fit to something you want to connect it to is important you may end up with a lot of extra work. Thin-wall pipe is nice for structures where weight and rigidity is an issue. (like custom sun shades or rain covers.) The most common sources of thin wall steel pipe are electrical conduit and exhaust tubing. A common source of thin-wall aluminum tubing is portable sunshades, tent poles, bike trailers and other consumer products. People throw this stuff away or recycle it when unusable. Aluminum tubing is hard to weld but there are a variety of mechanical connections possible. You gotta be creative here.
Electric motors fall into several types from the home handyman home shop viewpoint. 115 or 230 volt AC fractional size induction motors that run at one speed or a bit slower under load are common in appliances and shop tools. Common speeds are 1750 and 3500 rpm with a few at 1150rpm. Most standard frame motors of this type have 1/2 or 5/8 diameter shafts They are rarely found with gear heads to drastically reduce speed and increase torque originally made for industrial applications. Some can be wired to run in reverse. Motors out of modern large appliances are in this class but often have very poor or no protective covers. Shop tools for wood/metalworking aren't like that. Some AC single speed motors come in smaller sizes with 3/8", 5/16" or metric shafts. All these single speed induction motors are good for setting up with shop tools and various belts pulleys and couplings due to their simple standard shafts. Like old florescent lights they do not work with simple dimmer devices.
Among the common electric motor types is a generally smaller motor commonly referred to as a Universal motor. It is more powerful for its size but not well suited for continuous running at high load. It has brushes which spark and have low lives on the order of low hundreds of hours. It is favored for its light weight in portable tools. It's speed can be controlled with simple dimmer circuits. This control, however comes with a reduction in torque, not a increase in torque that comes with belts or gears at lower speeds. Most of these motors are built into appliances such that the housing for the motor is the specialized case designed to meet the use of the appliance. And usually the output mechanics rather than being a simple shaft is some unique mechanical connection unsuitable for most uses without major machine work. But there is a noteworthy exception, the use in a portable drill with a drill chuck that in addition to holding drill bits and hex shapes can also clamp on a shaft as large as 1/2" diameter like found in many smaller pulleys. Using one of these to drive a tool like a wire brush may require a way to clamp it down to a table so hand holding isn't required. In such a mode some creative way of holding the on-off trigger in an "on" position may be needed if the tool has no build in trigger lock. Absent a variable speed feature such as found in many modern tools an external dimmer device of adequate amps capacity can be used for a speed control.
Large DC motors with electronic controls that change input 115 volts AC to a DC current have been common especially in exercise machines. These are frequently found used at low prices. Unless you are well versed in electronics it is best to employ the entire motor and control package as came with machine and confining you creativity to repackaging the raw controls and dealing with mechanical connections to the new load to be driven. There are power limitations to these systems and much has been written on the subject. So I won't elaborate.
There is another type of motor that has occasional use in the shop. Typically a 115 volt AC device it is much used to drive small cooling fans using very few watts of power. These devices usually need some new covers and/or mounts when employed in a new cooling application. There is one other interesting application of these devices, useful because they are what is called "impedance protected". The large other motors become the harder they are to cool when fully loaded. And they have load limits above which the internal wiring overheats and burns its insulation.
An impedance protected motor is self cooling even with the current on at 10% higher than rated voltage and the rotor locked or missing entirely. It is used because cooling applications often involve the fan getting clogged and unable to turn. Rather than burn out all you need to do is free up the fan rotor. If it is both the missing rotor and fan (usually easy to remove along with its little shaft bushing mounts) its small size makes it a handy tool for demagnetizing small hand tools like screwdrivers. You turn it on either with a momentary switch or a small lamp to remind you that you forgot to turn it off. Not that leaving it on will hurt anything other than warming the immediate area at whatever your cost for electricity. The demagnetizing process works best if you insert the tool through the approximate center of the rotor opening one direction and withdraw it slowly in the other. The 60 hz reversals in the wires of the motor are going so fast that they just scramble the atomic alignment in the steel of the tool that gives it that annoying permanent magnetism.
Ed Weldon
In my last post I got pretty deep into electric motors; but it didn't mention one type to keep an eye out for. 30 or more years ago the appliance motor manufacturers were able to make two and three speed fractional hp frame 56 AC motors. The had a winding for each speed. I have found them primarily in washing machines made between 1960 and 1990. They seem to run around 1/2 hp at the top speed. I have installed them on two small drill presses and almost never have to change pulleys. Just us a DPDT switch for starting. Or two switches for a 3 speed set up. These were OEM fairly open appliance motors for which I had to weld up base mounting brackets to fit up on the drill press mounts behind the column and well above and away from the chips. I also found one very conventional frame 56, 1/2 hp base mount two speed motor off a 1970's motorized exercise bike thingie. I use that on my 6" atlas lathe. It has an internal self resetting circuit breaker if I run to heavy a cutting load. A bit of a nuisance; but very friendly for the lathe. It's been that way for 30 years and now that I have a bigger antique South Bend that little 2 speed motor will stay with the Atlas. Ed Weldon