Thread: Induction motor failing in sanding station

I rescued a small GMC disk and belt sanding station from the skip. When plugged in it just made a buzzing sound. I'm pretty sure it had never been connected to any sort of dust collection in its life and figured it might be just a matter of cleaning it out and fixing some contacts or a capacitor to get it running.

After a vacuum and general clean out it still wouldn't start straight off, but given a twirl on the disk it got up to speed and ran enough to use it for a while before stopping and throwing the breakers. It would not start at all if under the load of having a belt fitted.

I proceeded to pull the motor out and took the back off to look for a start cap, but all I could see were some apparently overheated (melted?) (start?) windings.
windings1.jpg windings2.jpg

The bit that buzzes on start is actually in the switch box. When I first vacuumed it out I assumed this was a no volt release safety switch, but having taken the back off the motor and not seeing any obvious centrifugal switch or capacitor, I'm now assuming this is actually something to do with the start circuit.

switch.jpg

At the moment I can use the disk only, after giving it some assistance to spin at startup, for short sanding sessions, but I'm guessing the cooked looking windings mean it is not really resucible for anything more. Can anybody confirm this is the case or is it possible the start thingy in the switch box could be an issue and maybe there is some way to get around it? Unlike the motor, the switch bit doesn't look to be in the least bit cooked.