Ok, good ideas, here's where I'm at in the thinking process:
First some background...I am very limited on space here. We have a 1 car garage that barely fits all my tools, vehicle, 2 bikes and the metal lathe/mill and some shelves, etc. We do not live on a base, we live on the economy and not in any military housing, etc. My work has only 5 people and we're out here 2-4 years at a time. Where I work is not on or part of a military base. We are our own facility managers, maintainers, etc and don;t have contractors, etc. The whole facility is us 5 people, 3 buildings and a gated in complex kind of thing. So you could say we are a small unit.
Now on to my thoughts...A generator would be great, but I don't think I can come up with the room for it. I could potentially keep it and my lathe at work and free up the garage I suppose, though our work space is limited as well. Anything I buy here would most likely output 240v also, but i'll look around out of curiosity. Anything from the states would be extremely expensive to ship unless shipped APO, but that has restrictions of not more than 70 lbs, etc. Their might be a possibility I can get someone to bring a generator with their goods. On that note, we barely made it under the weight limit to come out here so I would have to pay shipping costs back to the states for whatever I buy.
So I am thinking the variac is my best option. Now, my question is, Can I buy them locally or would they be setup for 240v and if so can they go down to 100v or do I use them inline w/ my transformer? Would a 240v voltac on 120v (used inline after a transformer) be adjustable to the right voltage? Also what power handling do they have? The lathe/mill draws a lot of power, mostly at startup, but still a lot. I have a Litefuze 3600 transformer that can handle my lathe current and is about as big of a transformer I can use on the house circuit.
http://www.bombayelectronics.com/LiteFuze_convertingbox_3600_Voltage_Converter_p/convertingbox_3600.htmIn fact, it occasionally trips the breaker just turning it on. It works great once powered up and the breaker on the transformer hasn't tripped so its plenty big enough for the lathe. Once powered up, i can start/stop the lathe w/o tripping the house breaker. Any smaller transformer tripped the breaker on the transformer using my lathe. Now If I get a U.S. variac, can they run off 50hz or will they fry like my motor did? The one on ebay I was looking at was listed 60hz. If I can find one that works, will it be under 70lbs to ship APO, and how much will it cost? These are all questions I need to look into, but a good option.
A completely different line of thinking (I mean COMPLETELY out of the box, but hear me out) was to make my own cooling setup for the lathe motors. I was thinking how hard would it be to get some small copper tubing and wrap it around the motors several, several times tightly and solder the tubing to a brass fitting for the hose. I could fit about 7 pieces of tubing to one end of a hose and just run water through it to the copper, then back to a hose fitting and out a hose to the drain. I'm not sure how effective it would be or how much water flow it would need to cool the motors, but this would be easier than setting up a radiator, fan, etc and a radiator and fan wouldn't reduce the temp much anyway I would think. The water out of the faucet is pretty cold year round. Also I do not pay for water out of pocket (land lord pays for it unless we go over a limit).
If the variac doesn't work out, I could give the water cooling a go.
Thanks for your ideas, I'll look more into all of it and hopefully come up with something that works for me.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
. Anyway he suggested about 200*F for the temp if possible. I have 2 of his cores here as well, he wants to do some economy tests when I get them back to him. 
