Denford Software & Machines

The VS280 lathe I purchased was originally fitted with the electronic speed adjustment control for the pulleys
The Motor originally was a 3 phase Swiss made unit that has very little to no information available for it .
The motor on mine the previous owner gave the wiring a crew cut very close to motor body .
A reasonable sort of replacement seemed to me to be ,something cheap ,easy to get hold of and have a good amount of torque .
12v car wiper motors are strong enough to turn the jacking thread on a scissor jack to lift a 3t vehicle .
Wiper motors are very abundent second hand and at a reasonable cost .
I have several wiper motors kicking about but all had a issue with what i wanted in a near perfect replacement .
Some are wired and fitted with home switches and internal reversing setups .. These can be a problem . A simple wiper motor is the Vauxhall Astra G Corsa C type front motors . Second hand or new about £20 .
i opted for a new Ebay unit £18.99 delivered .

Today I have stripped the new motor and wired it for reversing ..
The motors gearbox contains a metal timing disc that has 3 prongs that are revolving contacts for the home switch . This is not needed . You can cut away the prongs and wiring to this ..
The motor can not be wired for reverse without modding the internal setup . The home switch and one of the screws that retains the brush holders are earthed through the gearbox body and motor casing . Reversing the polarity causes a short .
I removed the -ve wire which links to 1 of the terminals on the home switch and becomes short when trimming the wiring , and replaced it with a longer wire .
I should say the carbon brush housings and wiring is fitted on a circular circuit board . Easy to remove the old wiring and replace the lead .
The circuit board retaining screw that sits beside the neutral brush is earthed to the gearbox body ,and needs insulating . I drilled the original hole oversize in the board and used some thick insuation tape over both the front and rear of the board around the hole to insulate the screw .
About 5 minutes work and a reversing DC motor .

If anyone wants anymore info let me know, always happy to help .

Hopefully that modification works out for you OK. The trouble with using a wiper motor is that many are only designed to work in one direction and only have thrust provision to suit that direction. I have used a wiper motor to power the cross slide on one of my lathes as a crude tracing attachment and it runs noticeably slower in the direction it wasn't intended to run in but works OK for the job. Things like window lift motors are intended to run both ways. I also have a Bosch catalogue which gives motor details and which way they run or both if bi-directional. If you have a part number you may be able to look up the details online.

Hi David the motor runs the same both FWD and REV . I couldn't see anything in the motor gearbox design to suggest otherwise . I have mounted a wiper motor very similar on a scissor jack previously and it worked well enough to lift a Transit pickup with load on the back .
The one I purchased was a new China Ebay item . Not the smoothest runner before modding . The motor isn't working 100% of the time only occassionally , Having a VFD with frequency adjustment alongside the pulleyed vari speed system will allow fine adjustment via potentiometer rather than relying solely on the pulleys .

I will try and post some images of the setup rewire and the motor running on a video link ..