On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 13:42:02 GMT, Ignoramus23077
wrote:

SO, today I visited this junk yard called Pioneer Industrial Services.

Here's what I bought:

1. 10 HP Century 230/460V 3 phase motor, clean looking: $40

A nice surprise about this motor is that it is not that heavy, perhaps
150-180 lbs. I can handle it alone.

2. 7.5 HP U.S. Electrical Motors motor, dirty looking: $20

Both motors spin freely.

3. Five 92 mF 500+ volt oil filled run capacitors, each the size of a
vodka bottle, no PCB: $5 for all five. The owner did not know what
they were, I pretended that I did not know either. I said, these
pieces look interesting, I will give you $5 for them, maybe I will use
them for something.

4. A big Square D safety disconnect, $8

5. A contactor, possibly wrong for the application, $3

The guy is actually nice and pleasant and sensible. I also dropped off
a huge transformer that I could not get rid of otherwise.

My plans are as follows: I will make a self starting rotary phase
converter, as outlined in

http://www.metalwebnews.com/howto/ph-conv/ph-conv.html

(see "Self Starting Phase Converter")

I will use 3 of my 92 mF capacitors, connected in parallel, between
leg 1 and leg 3 of the 10 hp idler, if I use a 10 HP idler.

I will create a web page about this project.

I have a question, is there some convention about leg numbering and
direction of the rotation of motor shafts? I do not want things to
rotate backwards and I want to do that in some conventional manner.

I really liked that junk yard, I will definitely go there again.

i
It makes no difference which way the RPC turns. And you can buy meters
which will tell you the direction of rotation by spinning the motor by
hand. But it really doesn't matter for most equipment. As each new
machine is hooked up turn it on momentarily and see if it turns the
right direction. If not, swap any two wires and it will spin
correctly. The only thing I do is to make sure I know which wire is
the manufactured leg at each machine. Some CNC equipment, especially
older equipment, can only tolerate the different voltage on one
particular leg. Fanuc controls can be this way. So you may need to
experiment. All that usually happens is that the machine will not
start. Manual machines with reversing switches work by swapping two
legs of the incoming power anyway so hooking up the machine and just
applying power momentarily should not cause any damage.
ERS