On Sep 25, 9:21*am, "Bob F" wrote:
Doug White wrote:
I was looking forward to spending a good bit of the weekend making
chips on my mill. *I'm making an aluminum sight base (weaver rail)
for a target pistol. Halfway through roughing it to size, I noticed
my "Quiet Suction Power" (Yeah, right) Shop vac wasn't running
smoothly. *Shortly after hearing the motor rev up & down erratically,
I smelled zorched motor smells.

It's a 14 year old 8 gallon model, and it hasn't actually seen tons of
use. *Milling chips are small, and I think I've emptied it only 3 or 4
times. *Motors seem to be the weakness of Shop Vac machines (not much
else to go wrong). *It died Friday night, so my email to the factory
about a replacement motor will go unanswered until Monday. *I can get
a replacement machine from Amazon for $67. *I found one place on-line
that will sell me the whole top head assembly for ~$90. *If the motor
is more than $50 with shipping, I'll be looking for a new vacuum.

The only big objections I have to the one I have is that it's still
too loud to run continuously w/o ear protection, and their motors
aren't very robust.

The alternative to just replacing it with another one is to spend more
bucks to get something like a Fein, which is supposed to be very
quiet. I have a hose setup with a nozzle that is all configured for
standard ShopVac 2.5" hose, and I don't know how much fussing would
be required to adapt that to the Fein.

Suggestions? *Thoughts? Comments?

I opened up one that started to smell "hot". ands discovered the one of the
wires on the motor going from the *armature coils to a commutator had broken. I
soldered it back together, and the motor went back to working right for a while,
till it broke again.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Those series-wound motors can speed pretty high, usually the wires are
banded or tied at the commutator to keep them from breaking off due to
centrifugal force. An armature that didn't have that done would be
one that was calculated to fail. I've also seen cheapies where the
wires were just punched into slots and crimped, no solder. Same deal,
probably calculated to fail right after the (short) warranty ran out.
Both cases are easy to fix beforehand, would be worth looking into new
motors to see.

Stan