winding your own brushless servo / spindle

[ihavenofish]

so, id been looking at rc toy motors, and noticed that many people like to make their own motors from scratch, and its really not very hard to do and not very expensive.

im wondering if anyones ever tried winding a servo or stepper or spindle motor? im looking at this purely as a fun learning experiment, as hand winding is obviously not going to be cost effective as a product.

thinking of getting some laser cut laminations, some neodymium magnets i found locally for cheap, and some copper wire and seeing what happens! haha.

any thoughts? anything to look out for? the rc motors tend to use very high pole counts with flat magnets, where i see professionally made motors with less magnets that have a curved surface. then theres the winding pattern, the rc stuff is very basic because all you want is torque and speed, most good servos seem to have winding loops for reduced cogging but i cant find any specific enfo on what the effect is.

then theres things like bridged stators, which let you wind from the outside which is easier for hand winding i think. theres also shaped stators that are used for the servo housing so you dont need a case.

[ihavenofish]

well, ive decided that the obvious place to start is by making one of these rc motors and experimenting with windings, poles and magnets.

ill be playing with that after xmas some time, and will then try to translate that info to a cnc usable servo.

on the interesting side, its only about $25 for an rc brushless motor and control so i wont be wasting a ton of cash! haha.

[TOTALLYRC]

Look for info about cdrom motor conversions.

Mike

[scadvice]

You may consider buying old motors that do not work from a surplus store and salvage to lams out of them. Rewind the stators and soup up the rotors with your upgraded magnets. Its a thought, you not only get the rotor and stator parts for near nothing, you also get the housing and end caps to use to reverse engineer your own spindle and servo housings.

Steve

[ihavenofish]

so i was given a nice 1hp electrospindle that was supposedly dead. i was planning on rewinding it.

turns out the winding is fine though, and the rotor has been demagnetised. oh well, no sense rewinding, but it might be fun to make a shaft and 8 pole rotor.