Car or cycle starter for grain mill motor?

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whitehause

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Getting my MM2 in a couple days and was thinking about a motor for it. I work at a Harley shop and can get a motorcycle starter pretty cheap. I was wondering if anyone had used one for a mill motor. Should be plenty of torque, and because it's not turning over a big engine, overheating shouldn't be a problem. They don't spin fast, so that should eliminate the need for pulleys. The biggest draw back would be that it's 12v, so a big battery, or a pretty powerful converter would be needed. I've seen lots of great builds with standard 110 motors, but didn't see any with a starter motor.
 
How many minutes can you use a starter motor at a time? My understanding is limited, but I'd always thought they were meant to run for only a few seconds at a time. I'm sure some of that is the idea that you don't want to discharge your battery fully by running that hi-amperage motor for a long duration of time - but aside from the battery itself, will the motor overheat if run for 3, 4, 5 minutes straight? 10 minutes? Where is the point of limitation, basically.
 
The motors overheat because of the massive torque(or load) they must handle. A grain mill will put almost no load on the motor as compared to what it usually sees, so I don't think that will be a problem. I'm going to try it, so I guess I'll find out:D
 
This should work fine but keeping the battery charged will be a pain they used ford starters on kids ridding toys in the sixtys
 
The motors overheat because of the massive torque(or load) they must handle.

Cool. That's exactly why I asked it as a question / pondering, instead of giving it as hard, set advice. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
 
The other potential problem: to get that high torque starter motors are often serial wound. Under light loads, they can speed up tremendously.
 
The other potential problem: to get that high torque starter motors are often serial wound. Under light loads, they can speed up tremendously.

Yep....that's the one problem I might have to work out. If it is I'll have to look into a speed controller.
 

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