Treadmill Motor Use?

J

Jrmysell

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May 18, 2014
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546
I’ve seen some posts here and there about people using treadmill motors for their grinders. I already have a sealed motor for my belt grinder and disc grinder both running off kbac. My grandparents recently decided to throw their treadmill away so I had them save the motor just in case. Wondering what to use it for now. Not sure what HP or anything like that it is. Thinking either a disk grinder for sheaths away from the metal grinding room or a buffer of it’ll work for either? Any other ideas? And can it be reversed if I do try the disk?
 
I have had a 3hp on my grinder for a couple years. Next grinder will be proper but i have no complaints. You can get them cheap from surplus center. Biggest pain is fitting a drive wheel. I'd love to put one on my drill press.
 
They can be nice motors.
Usually powered by DC using PWM to attain variable speed.
Some use TENV housings which is pretty much required in a metallic dust dirty environment.
I hope you saved its speed controller.
 
Without the matching control circuit, you are asking for a nightmare making it run. They are most all DC motors and the control panel has the electronic drive built in. If you are good with electronics, you can figure out a way to run it of a surplus DC drive, but the end result is a motor that isn't really good for a grinder due to the shaft type, open frame, and mounting style.
 
on a budget, they are great but you need to be handy and will likely have some vibration depending on your drive adaptation. The shafts are very short. A lot of guys just use the flywheel for a drive.

Wiring is easy and depending on the controller in your treadmill, you can get a bridge rectifier and DC controller unit from Amazon for pretty cheap butt then you need to fashion some sort of box to house everything. I also have my motor wrapped in an old shirt to "try" to keep the shavings out of it. They are handy to have and probably have a million uses but due to the issues Stacy noted above, a grinder is one of the worse but you can make it work. As noted, I'd love one on one of my drill presses.

 
The problem I had with mine way back in the day was because thy where magnet motors the grit would get sucked in and stay.
 
I salvaged one several years ago, but haven't tried to build anything out of it for the above reasons. But I kept the whole control panel so I could crank my grinder up to "Fat Burn". :p
 
JTknives said:
The problem I had with mine way back in the day was because thy where magnet motors the grit would get sucked in and stay.
Click to expand...
I had a treadmill motor with a variable controller”from Surplus Center, hooked up by a friend that I used for a 9” disc sander & just blasted out the motor with my air compressor once a week. It ran fine for over 12 years until a creep I let use my shop stole it!
 
Sell the treadmill as a working unit. A good quality one retailed for ten thousand bucks.

If not, ten cents a pound in the scrap yard. Take the whole treadmill there along with anything you can find on big garbage day.

Use that $ to buy a real motor, new or used.

Treadmill motors are a lot of work to fit it, and when they fail the next one is completely different all over again.
 
This wouldn’t be used in the same room as my main grinder. It would be in a room with sawdust not metal dust. But not sure if they kept the speed control or not
 
I've a friend who put one in a HF mill/lathe combo machine as the mill motor. It gave him a vari speed mill.
 
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