Saturday, February 28, 2009

Too many motors to know what to do with

So in the past few days I got to strip down another 4 copiers to steal parts from them.  I now have several boxes full of different parts.  There is a stepper motor box, a DC/AC motor box, a bearings and gears box, etc.  I think I will definitely have enough stuff now to get something working.  After I got some experience with the photocopiers I also figured out what areas of the machine typically have the good motors.  For instance, the document feeder on the top of the machines for automatic scanning of multi-page documents almost always has 2 good steppers in it.  I have the limitation of a tiny sedan to pack all this stuff in, but knowing this, I could just take the top part of the machine off and fit that in my trunk for disassembly after all the 8 to 5ers head home.  Here is a shot of one of the big document feeder tops



Note the decent sized stepper in the bottom right.  There is usually another hidden over there on the bottom left under some housings and such.  So after taking the tops off of about 4 machines and stripping them down at my apartment, two things have happened.  One, my living room has been converted to a dumpster for stripper down photocopier remains.  It's getting harder and harder to get to the door or the couch for that matter.  I'm going to have to make a dumpster run this weekend.  However, number two is that I have now acquired a good surplus of motors that I can use to select my ideal choices from.  Here is a shot of all of the ones I have after my past couple days work



It is a wide assortment of nema 23's and nema 17's.  I also have a big box of AC motors, but those are of less interest.  Right now I am thinking the two on the top right will be the ones used for the XY axes of the machine and the big guy in the top row near the middle will control the Z axis.  Also note the motor coupling attached to one of the motors.  Here's a close up



I made it using scrap metal, a lathe, a drill press, and a tap set.  The 8-32 set screws in there hold the motor shaft and metal studding in place thanks to the tapped threads.  Being that I haven't done too much work with metal before I was pretty excited to be able to make this and might start making some more metal parts as I gain more experience in the shop.  

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