This past Tuesday, the motor team and several other members had the pleasure of taking a tour of Dahl-Beck Electric‘s motor repair facilities. Dahl-Beck is a local company based in Richmond that performs a wide range of repairs on industrial-scale electric motors brought in from customers around the world. They provide an incredible and invaluable service to clients who are able to bring in broken motors ranging from <1 hp to 10,000 hp and have them disassembled, evaluated, completely overhauled if necessary with new wiring and newly machined surfaces, enameled, painted, re-tested, and shipped back as good as new.
The CalSol motor team in particular is interested in Dahl-Beck’s ability to vacuum-impregnate motors with epoxy to ameliorate vibrations and insulate electromagnetic components. By requesting use of Dahl-Beck’s vacuum pressure impregnation (VPI) services, we could achieve a much higher quality potting of the current design of our stator than if we attempt to achieve it ourselves.
A big thank you to Dahl-Beck employees Kevin Sams and Dan Neal for taking the time out of a busy work season to give us a tour of their well-maintained facilities and chat about our motor project, and thank you to Mick Franssen of the UC Berkeley mechanical engineering student machine shop for introducing us to Kevin!
Be sure to check out photos we took on our Flickr.