Saturday, December 22, 2012

What did I buy?

So I picked up a couple of the AC24LS motors that are available for so cheap now after the Azure Dynamic's bankruptcy.  they are brand new and normally ~$300 but you can get them for a couple hundered right now. I picked up one C-face version of the motor and one with prioritary face designed to work with a custom transmission that I can going to play with on the bench.  I am comfortable with DC but when it comes to AC motors I have some learning and a cheap motor like this is perfect. I had a free hour today so I decided to pull one apart and take a look.

I'll start by saying the motor is really simple and pulling it apart and putting is only a few bolts but there are a few things that you need to pay attention too.  I took pictures and posted here as reference for anyone else who bought one of the hundreds of motors that are on the market right now.

 I pulled of one end by removing the 4 long bolts that run the length of the case.


The red wire is for sensing the stator temp and the black wire is the signal from the encoder.


Here you can see the PN for the bearing with the integrated encoder


And here are the wire colors



 These washers look like belleville washers for the axial preload.  Make sure you put them back in the right orientation.


Here you can see the two pins that retain the encoder.  Make sure these are capturing the signal wire at the very last step before you tighten the 4 case bolts up.


I made 4 marks (in blue) on the outside of the end cap to show where the tapped holes are for alignment of the housing.


This big "screw" looks to be for compressing the belleville washers and provide the axial preload.  I didn't have the right tool so some tapping with a strategically placed screwdriver.  I need to look up and see if I can find the torque values for this and the 4 case bolts.  I also pulled the connectors outside the housing for bench testing.  The factory wiring harness runs into a potted box, with the connectors out I can access the wires directly.