Treadmill Motor Conversion Mistakes, Going over Common Mistakes people make on their Conversions

Another great easy to understand simple explanation. Thanks for taking the time to educate all of us.

Thanks for this video , I just finished a wood lathe conversion , on a cheap mechanical variable speed lathe . Love the power and speed control , one more thing to complete is a dual resistor as I’m getting a small lag at the start of the speed control . Thanks for the help .

Two years ago you inspired me to convert two wood lathes to variable speed, Daze. Then you helped fine tune them with the proper gearing, a cooling fan, a quick start bypass switch (disabled safe start), a tachometer and a reverse switch. The speed control has made a huge difference in tooling a fine wood finish instead of using 80 grit sandpaper. I rarely touched the four gang pulleys before knowing you and now speed changes are made 10-20 times each project. If you come to east coast Canada (New Brunswick), Daze, you have a place to stay. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Salute! 👍👍

These are all great lessons and you offer the correct solution for this application (machine power conversion). Almost any application really. There is another solution for some applications, although cooling and gearing is applicable to every electric motor application. Specifically, when electric motors are used as traction motors which will require the motor to run from 0 RPM through the max RPM, using two of the smaller motors might be a better option. In the early 2000's my tiny business built high performance stand up scooters before it became the thing it has now become. We had limited resources to source our products from. To keep costs down it made sense to use the standard Chinese scooter parts, but simply installing a 300 Amp (golf cart) controller would ignite the brush housing in the first ten feet. Likewise, any attempt to modify existing controllers resulted in MOSFET fires. Now you know why we call them Metal Oxide Smoke & Fire Emitting Transistors. What did work in this application was to run 2 of the best cheap China motors available which were rated at 800 watts. Since the entire vehicle and rider only weighed 300lbs, we could dump stupid amounts of current into two motors for just a few seconds and get away with it. All we were really trying to do was teach the gasoline scooter people a lesson about electricity in a short drag race. It worked.

great explanation keep up the great videos.

Thank you! really enjoy your channel.

very good information - thanks

Thanx a stack 👍🏻 Very helpfull.

Great info!

Nice vid. Thanks. 👍👍👍

Have you messed around with any 3 phase AC drive motors? You can find them in almost all Life Fitness commercial treadmills. Matrix treadmills probably have the most powerful commonly seen treadmill motor(made by Johnson Controls) out for the past ten years. Cybex is owned by Life Fitness so their stuff is cross compatible sometimes. And Precor and Startrac commercial treadmills also have some of the most powerful motors out there. Most are AC motors though… there are two Precor treadmill models called the 932i or 946i that is about 20 years old now. If you come across one of those, they have Massive DC drive motors made by Leeson. Very rare to see one of those motors ever fail and the bearings are easy to service/replace.

New subscriber here. Thanks for the vids. Quick question, can an EMI filter be used in place of a choke on a TM motor?

Thinking on building a liam f type wind turbine power regerator using any kind of motor, which motor model would you recomend? And material for the wind turbine? Fiberglass maybe?

Horsepower is for braggin’ & torque is for draggin’. You can have all the horsepower you want but you ain’t going anywhere without torque.

Terimakasih

So uh question for the expert in the field, I just salvaged a commercial 220 volt treadmill and pulled a 3phase motor, I can tell that the VFD is on the control board but am helpless as far as figuring out what to do to get it turning. Have you messed with these? Do I just need to bite the bullet and purchase a new VFD?

Nice explanation. I would have fallen for that horsepower trap if I didn't see this video.

How do you determine the torque needed for a particular machine to tool?

Can we use water pump motors as replacement for treadmills?

I’m sure there’s a guy out there about to screw up his treadmill motor powered whatever, all because he hasn’t watch any of your awesome videos.