One day I came across a Bissell Spinwave on an auction website for about $4. IF you are not familiar with them there is a picture below.
The Spinwave is an electric mop that is actually quite pricey, I could not pass it up for $4. I charged it up and the batteries worked fine but as I turned it on it just would not spin.
The mechanical engineer in me quickly started taking it apart piece by piece. The image above shows the insane amount of parts that were inside of this thing
I quickly came upon the motor. This motor had two black shells on it with two shafts (for the two spinning pads. This motor worked my having a worm gear on each end of the two shafts. This worm gear meshed with an internal gear on the bearing shaft causing rotation
I took the black casings off to find the internal gears. One of which seemed completely unscathed while the other was absolutely destroyed. This was obviously the problem and the reason why the mop would not spin.
I got my calipers out and started to model a replica gear. This was quite difficult because the teeth had a slight pitch to them and were hard to measure. Once the new gear was fit on the shaft it looked exactly like the other one.
I tapped the shaft in and placed it back into its bearing housing. It fit perfectly and even meshed well with the motor worm gear. Now at this point any normal person who has gotten this far would reassemble the mop and boom. But not me. My ADHD brain somehow conjured up a plan to make this deal shaft motor into a bench top sander.
The image above shows a Ryobi bench top sander. It has both a belt sander on top and a disc sander on the bottom. This is the perfect use of a dual shaft motor.
I purchased a speed controller off of amazon and rigged up the charger from the broom as an AC to DC converter to run to the project so I could control the speed of the sander.
I used the original female jack and soldered that to the speed controller. I took the male end of Spinwave charger and soldered the positive and negative of that to the positive and negative of an AC to DC laptop charger. With this, the power was done.
Next I went into CAD and made two halves of a stand for the motor. This was extremely difficult as measuring for all the holes was quite tedious. Nevertheless I printed it out and the holes lined up perfectly. I then loaded some threaded rod in my drill and went straight through the mount and all the existing holes. Each half of the mount included threaded inserts so the black casings could mount mechanically to the mount.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/6aX7wyajx3jxUcVz7
The video in the link above shows the speed controller successfully controlling the speed of the motor.
I then created a mechanism to hold the belt that would be on top. This mechanism included a roller on the end that was on a slider and when the lever was pushed the spiral would increase, sliding the roller further along, tightening the belt. This allowed for quick belt changes and tight belts. The roller had two nuts, one on each end. I designed the piece so that the print would stop at certain layer heights. This allowed me to drop the nut in and the printer would continue to print right over it.
I created an adapter that could mount an extra part from a handheld orbital sander. This part had velcro and would allow me adhere basic sanding pads from Lowes or Home Depot.
At this point during testing the 3d printed gear I had created broke. This meant that the motor no longer supplied any rotation. It was more effort than it was worth to attempt to fix again. I didn't have any stronger materials either so the gear would just keep breaking in the future.
Either way I completed the CAD model and theoretically it would work perfectly as long as that gear wasn't 3D printed.
In the above CAD models you can see a full enclosure which, was next on my print list, as well as the full articulating belt sander arm that could be fastened with a set screw to secure it in place. I also had aspirations of incorporating a dust collection system that my shop vac could simply press fit in to.
If that little gear did not break or if I had a resin printer to create a stronger one, this idea would have worked perfectly and could have been my best idea yet. Instead, I just went to harbor freight and bought a cheap bench top sander like a normal person.
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