Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Motor Disassembly – Part 1

In this post I’ll go over the first part of motor disassembly.  To prevent this from being an overly long and boring, I’ll break this into a few posts.

The 2 screws on either side of motor cover have to be removed before taking off the cover.  When removing the cover, I had to pry it off just a bit because it was stuck on pretty good. A little wiggling and a very small of prying got the cover off and without hurting any of the coils (very important!)

Motor without caps

The next step is removing the brush caps and brushes.  Here is a view showing the brush caps just before removal and another the springs of both brushes exposed.Brush cap removal   Both brushes on motor IMPORTANT – before you completely remove the brushes, mark them some way to  indicate their orientation prior to removal.  This is because the end of the brush has some curvature where the brush where it rubs against the commutator of the armature.    These next two photos show the brush after I put a mark on it to indicate orientation (but before removing it from the motor) and anther photo showing the curvature at the end of the brush.

Marked Top brush Brush wear

I also added a “T” and “B” on each brush so I could remember which brush goes into the top or bottom of the motor.   I’m not sure if the T or B really matter, but I figure it can’t hurt since I’m labeling things anyway.

  Labeled and removed from motor

The next step was to remove the armature by loosing the set screws in the spiral gear.  If it weren’t for my handy Adjusters Manual I wouldn’t have even known these screws existed because they were so covered in muck/grease.  I removed some of the grease and tried to take a photo of the two screws, but I could only show one at a time (see below).

Armature Set ScrewArmature Set Screw - emphasis

With both set screws loosened (I didn’t remove them for fear wasn’t sure I could get them back in again) I then carefully removed the armature – making sure I didn’t harm the coils in any way.

Armature removed

More to follow…..

2 comments:

  1. I went to loosen the screw holding the top brush in on my Singer 15-91 and it broke off. Any idea where I can get a new one, and how to get the old broken-off piece out of the motor housing?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I went to loosen the screw holding the top brush in on my Singer 15-91 and it broke off. Any idea where I can get a new one, and how to get the old broken-off piece out of the motor housing?

    ReplyDelete