Well, what I had been trying to avoid with the 48V conversion and playing with pulley sizes has not worked. The motor has failed on the mower. I was mowing and suddenly lost power and heard a odd rubbing noise from the mower. Then, a small bit of smoke. I quickly turned it off and pushed it back to the garage (from the farthest corner of the yard of course).
Here we have the main issue with the motor. This is the armature, the part that spins. It appears the motor overheated, the glue that held the wire let loose, and the wire hit the outer housing as it was spinning and broke it clean off. This happened on both sides of the armature.
Here we can see a bunch of thread that was trimmed off the armature as well. It made a big mess all over the inside of the motor as it shredded it up into little scraps that make it look almost like dust.
So, I am now looking into what to do. My options are to rewind the motor, or find a replacement. I’m leaning more toward a replacement seeing as this motor was only really designed to put out 1.6 horsepower and I am making it put out 4-5 horsepower which makes it run hot. So, if I rebuild it I’ll have to cool the motor somehow to stop this from happening again. It might just be better if I got a motor actually rated for the horsepower that the mower requires.
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