ProdMod ™

If there is any product that I have yet to cover whether it’s a gadget, a toy, or a mechanism, just ask and I’ll try to dissect it for you.I’ll give a quick review of the product performance, take it apart, take photos and comment on how it was designed and manufactured. I’ll identify any parts that can be useful for other projects.

Just leave a request in the comments section of this post, be as specific or as broad as you want to be.

It’s simple. Give it a shot and test me out.

I have been thinking about brushless motors for a while now, and I wanted to replace a small brush motor with a brushless one but wasn’t sure how to go about it. I looked up how they work to refresh my memory, then I thought I might make one out of permanent magnets and a few coils, but how was I going to control the switching of the coils? If I did use some kind of IC chip to do the logic it would add cost. Then I thought maybe I can just use some kind of analog circuit. Like maybe an infrared sensor tied to a transistor to time the pulses, or maybe a hall effect sensor. So Looked up “simple brushless motor” and found this site. It shows you how to make your own with all those sensors including a reed switch, pros cons etc.

I started to feel like making my own would be a pain and not efficient anyway, so I tried to think of a brushless motor I could find around the house and remembered that PC fans are brushless. I was pretty sure the PC only gave a voltage to the fan and did not offer any pulsing, so the motor must have some logic circuit built in. Perfect. I looked for photos online of PC fans opened up but a quick searched turned up nothing. I don’t know if a PC fan has enough power for what I’d like it to do. But I knew I was ready to take one apart.

So I found an old PC fan that I am pretty sure didn’t work and went at it.

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I found a cylinder magnet and used is as the conductive rod or nail. I still attached my disc magnet and tested out the motor.

Now I have two diameters to work with and two speeds. The cylinder gives the lower speed and the disc gives the higher speed.

It may be hard to see in the video but check it out!