Mini-lathe POWER FEED - DIY

[DIYSwede]

I second that - wiper motors are cheap, rugged and readily available at car junk yards for a few bucks.
Their cast-in mounting holes makes them easily adaptable to anything needing up to 300 rpms.
Note that for running it in reverse you'll preferably need to rework the bearing housing
to take up the tendency of the worm pushing the gear outwards against the axle end.

Personally I salvage all I can get my hands on from work, where motorized office desks occasionally get scrapped,
while suffering from onboard electronics failures, the motors aren't even run in, as descibed in this post:

Very powerful gearbox from wiper motor.

Note: These KSV 5035s have NO steenkin' fancy internal interrupt switches, no field windings or high-speed capabilities,
just plain vanilla (75-150W @ 100% DF) PM DC motors that'll take the juice and run with amazing torque for such a small unit.
Also note: While these motors come from the heavy duty 150 kg max load office pillars,
the lighter duty office tables of the IKEA and the like brands have much smaller motors (by Ketterer & Elvi for instance)
which only has 10-20% DFs (usually stated 1 min on, 4-9 mins off...),
which means that they'll get pretty hot after some 15 minutes of use as a power lead screw for my 7x14" mini lathe:

-Yet another mini lathe power leadscrew drive... For the love of ...

The biggie ones however, (>2" dia) take some real abuse (300-400% temporarily), I've braked them to standstill at max V and A
and I've never even shredded any of the Delrin worm gears inside. Never had a brush fail or wear out either,
they're designed in the fifties after all, and built ever since for continous duty truck & bus wipers
and the bare-bones (w/o worms) KP 5035 motors have been running as car, truck & bus defroster fans for decades...

Good enough for my zero-budget instant prototypes at work: motorized camera dollies, smallish hoists, turntables
or other portable stuff which cannot have an attached mains cable - powered instead by some series connected 10 Ah SLA batteries
salvaged when the whiz kids in the IT dept change their UPS batteries every other year.
Speed control thru a 10 buck Chinese (2 kW: max 50V & 40 A) PWM board w pot, via short 12 AWG cables to the motor,
makes for safe, hassle- and smokefree operation at stable revs nearly independent of axle power loading.

2 cents
Johan

[machining 4 all]

DIYSwede, thank you for your interest and comments!