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Soooooo.... I am looking to purchase a good motor for all my shaping disc needs. What am I looking for? What do you guys use?

The Smoking Yeti wrote:Soooooo.... I am looking to purchase a good motor for all my shaping disc needs. What am I looking for? What do you guys use?

I'd recommend nothing less than 1/3 HP, 1725 RPM, TEFC (totally enclosed fan cooled)

Depends on how frugal you plan of being. Pretty easy to find a 1.5-2hp treadmill that is toasted and salvage the motor and possibly the speed control. Someone on Craigslist might literally pay you to haul away their old treadmill.

My main sanding motor used to be a 0.55kW (3/4 hp) , 1450 rpm which worked perfectly in my opinion. With 60grit wheels it eats briar and with 320grit is sands nice and smooth.

I've recently dedicated that motor to buffing and now use a 1.5Kw (2.1hp) 1450rpm 3-phase motor which is hooked up to 2 phase power (so it only delivers about 1/3 of its optimal torque at the moment) until I get my shopped equipped with 3-phase electricity.
This works pretty much the same obviously.

Anything over 2.5hp is basicly overkill to use for sanding afaic...

I salvaged a baldor 1/2 hp 820 rpm motor from my family farm... Is that too slow for sanding? What would that be good for? It was free
It was formerly used with a grinding stone so if I can't find another use for it I can at least sharpen my tools with it I guess.

-Sam

I think it will be fine. If not, you could always rig up a pulley to get something spinning faster on the business end.

I will test it out and see if its strong enough. There is an ancient Rockwell tablesaw with a motor I can harvest... I can always put it back on if we ever decide to recondition it. Thanks Sasquatch


-Sam

I'm using a Baldor 1/2 HP motor spinning at 1725 rpm and am very happy. You'll pay a bit more for a Baldor, but damn is it a sweet motor. I use it for both sanding and buffing.

What kind of pulley system could I rig up to step up my rpm from 820 to 1700


-Sam

Go to 1640rpm, the logical step. Just put a pulley on your motor and a pulley exactly half the diameter on the business end. (4" on the motor and 2" in the other end for example).

The most flexible solution would be 2 3-step pulleys, one on either end and offcourse mirror them because otherwise you'll just get 3 times the same speed

Great thanks, I will look at the farm for a motor that will work better this weekend. I hold promise in my grandfathers collection of old motors, it seems they hide from you until you go digging under old fence posts and barbed wire . I think the table saw motor will work, but I didn't look at it extensively. Just said, hey there is a vintage rockwell table saw.
I would really rather not have to set up a pulley system, I actually removed the old rusty pulley wheel from the motor, probably just to have to put it back on, and it was a bear.
Thanks for the help!