Another bag of worms

[Bart Leetch]

I have received a older free treadmill & taken it apart it has a motor rated at 2.65 HP with a continuous duty of 1.5 HP.

I am looking at this as an interim solution until I get a new lathe & hope to hook it up to run my old Delta double duty lathe.

The motor has a big cast iron flywheel & fan combination on the front. I am thinking it needs this for more then cooling? It also has the 1 1/4" ribbed pulley as an integral part of it. Would it be possible to rig a fan to blow on the motor & then mount a regular V belt pulley? Or does this motor need this as a fly wheel.


I have everything disassembled from the treadmill & re-hooked up & test run on the bench & it all works fine.

I am fine with lower speeds on this lathe so it wouldn't need to crank up to real high speeds 200-1200 would work just fine for me.

Also it there a way to control this system without the great big control panel, say closer to regular rheostat in size? The panel is 6" x 25".

I have figured out how to mount the panel so just what I need to get to will be exposed.

Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome.

[Dennis Ford]

I used a treadmill motor on an old metal lathe until the control burned up (several years). You are correct about the fan being needed to cool the motor. The flywheel was needed to make the treadmill run smoothly, you could do without it. You can not control this motor with just a rheostat, if the panel works, use it. You may need a jack-shaft for speed reduction as treadmill motors develop their power at fairly high rpm.

[Donny Lawson]

I come up on old treadmills all the time and I have a motor set aside for something.It works great.I would love to see some pics of something made from these motors.I've been so busy that I haven't had time to figure out what to use it for.
Donny

[Rob Cunningham]

I put a treadmill motor on my lathe over Christmas vacation. There are a few pictures in the post:
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=128519
You will need a potentiometer to control the speed. My control panel is just an on/off switch, the pot, and a power on light. My motor has a separate fan on the other side of the motor. The fan is necessary to keep the motor cool. I also have it blowing across the circuit board to dissipate the heat. Hope that answers some questions