Homebrew Magnetic Motor Starter

This is one of those things that I always wanted, and wanted to do besides. Well now I have it, and have done it too. I will share how I managed to do it with you in this article if you bear with me for a bit.

When I got this saw it had no motor or switch. I put a motor on it and rigged up a switch using a scrap circuit breaker. That setup was hardly ideal but I said to myself while I was doing it this is temporary, all the while also thinking is this going to be temporarily permanent? We all know how those temporary things can go don't we?

I used that switch and it worked, but every time I flipped it all I could hear in my head was my inner voice echoing, "this is temporary ..." Stuff like that can really throw me off my game let me tell you. I wanted my push button start and stop buttons!

I didn't have my push button switches because there is more to them than just the switches. I have 3 sets of push button switches in fact. It was an agonizing decision which I was going to use too. Ultimately I went with the ones that were in a box already. They were another yard sale purchase I made in a previous season, 25 cents if I recall correctly. Was under a dollar, I remember that.

What I didn't have was the motor contactor to hook them up to. Those don't come cheap either. One day I was out doing yard sales and I ran across a definite purpose contactor new in a box that looked like it'd do the job to me, and the price was right, $5 so I picked it up.

I picked up a few other knick knacks that day as well but forget about all of that, this article is about the little dark blackish brownish thing in front of the little brown box on the right. The big boxes in the back are just backdrop.

It says on the box here Definite Purpose Contactor Power Poles 2, Amp Rating 30, Coil Voltage 24V 50/60 Hz That little beastie ought to do the trick.

Now it is that coil voltage rating that is going to make this a bit more complicated. But we're going to address that shortly.

Isn't it great that we live in the modern age of digital information? Sometimes it just seems like the information we can access on the Internet is limitless doesn't it? I know it does to me. So I jumped into my favorite search engine with what I thought was a good phrase to use to look for what I wanted, a schematic for motor contactors, and lo and behold tens, nay hundreds of thousands of returns! A veritable deluge of information was inundating me, so I dove right in and waded through about 28 or so pages of search results but didn't see what I was looking for.

Yeah well maybe we're living in the digital age but this might not exactly be the golden era of it yet? Anyhow a bit discouraged I decided to make my own. Seemed easier than finding a needle in a hay stack to me. I'm sure it is out there somewhere, but where I've no idea. Anyhow here is mine.

Sure there are hundreds of thousands of similar circuits on the net but all the ones I saw had the same coil as output voltage so they could latch themselves. My contactor didn't run off the output voltage I was planning on running through it, not even close. So I had to add the "Latching Relay" to my schematic to get around this little detail. It makes things a bit more complicated, but it makes things work the way I want them too so it is a fair trade off.

I also added an additional relay because I use an external fan to cool my motor, long story why that I won't get into here. But you could use that to say run a vacuum dust collector, or eliminate it if you decide you want one of these too. So the relay named "Fan Relay" is there but it doesn't have to be.

As simple as all of this looked on paper I'm still quite the doubting Thomas when it comes to original circuits of my own design so before I invested too much time making a final copy I made a quick bench lash up of it to make sure it worked as I'd desired. It works like a champ too!

That thing I had going on my desk I couldn't mount in any permanent fashion. No, no, no! That would be an easy way to get on a first name basis with my fire department in fairly short order. Line voltage driven electrical equipment needs to be securely mounted in sturdy enclosures.

I didn't have a suitable box in my vast collection of junk so I made my own. I could write a whole article about how I struggled to do this but instead I'll just put a series of pictures here. This isn't really what this project is about. We all like action shots taken in the heat of battle and I got a number of them.

Some seem to think so. For me they are more of a utilitarian nature. This project needs a number of them. I have a knock out kit but oddly it doesn't include quite the right size I need so I used a step drill. More action shots of the box getting pierced. Having just typed that sentence I think I am going to be driving hits to this site from a strange crowd when crawlers get a hold of that line!

I hope they're not too disappointed. Heavy Metal rules!

Keeping in the double entendre theme I seem to be going with here. Now that the machining is done on the box it it time to put all the bits inside it and hook everything together. It isn't even a bad idea to test out work at this stage either. I did.

Finally! Well not quite. I got to this point and walked the box over to my machine and I was like where the heck am I going to put this thing? So I ripped out what was there and made some rough shelving it could sit on. I'll also include a picture of the bracket I made rigged up before I welded it. I wanted to make sure it was just so.

To do that I had to take a bit longer a view of it, and try to access the hand cranks around them and all. I actually took the bracket picture as a construction aid for when I needed to layout the pieces to weld them together. But when I was looking at the mock up I noticed two planes that needed to be parallel with one and another so I used that as my alignment reference. Oh, and some pencil marks I'd put on the pieces too.

The final picture is what I'd made previously that this replaced. I guess you can view it as the before picture.

Are we there yet? Not quite. Now it is time to wire everything to everything.