Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, the article doesn't really tell us much.

Motor winding is an amusing problem. Everybody making motors has a powered winder. It's handling the wire ends that can be either manual or automatic. If you look at videos of winders, automating the wire end handling is most of the machinery.

Here's an overview of winding automation:

Full auto, robotic transfer.[1]

Full auto, manual transfer [2].

Semi auto. [3].

Manual, powered. [4]

Manual, unpowered motor overhaul.[5] (Country girl in China who fixes motors and engines.)

Those winding machines are all from the same company, NIDE. You can buy as much automation as you want, depending on your labor costs. Option [4] is cost-effective if you can have one machine tender per machine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FiCQX0y7-A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZvSem4Cd8

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vqLxMlvk0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrcnl3Zjc6Y

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0LOfUjE4SA

The opportunity for the west is that an engineer with todays resources can work on building [1] for $5-10k and get into the DC motor business from your shed. Im working on this myself right now, I want to try and start an autonomous manufacturing company here in Australia, maybe I'll start with motors. I predict once the war is over, Ukraine will become a robotics & manufacturing powerhouse because they've already got this model working

Are you winding something in an incredibly specialized kV / wattage / torque or something? DC motors are incredibly inexpensive, how could a hobbyist sell them?

The only problem with PM motors is magnets. Everything else is trivial.

Rotorlab (rotorlab.com.au) are or were doing this in Australia. They had a couple of posts about their machinery: a winding machine, CNC mill, etc. I believe they were bought out pretty quickly by a US company. Can't recall who though.

The problems with Australia are:

1. The terrible quality of the locally manufactured items. I am in Sydney and will absolutely not buy anything marked Made In Australia. I have been burnt too many times.

2. The nearly 100% mortality rate among the companies.

Companies survive longer when you buy from them

> you

No, that is only one customer. There need to be lots of customers for a company to survive. So, ideally you recommend, based on good quality.

You take a bit of a gamble if you need warranty or customer service later on.

Some sort of network effect again, I suppose. There's a better term that's can't find now.

People tend to buy from companies with reasonable quality products.

Australian made products unfortunately do not pass that initial hurdle..

> Motor winding is an amusing problem.

Also really difficult to do, with huge tradeoffs depending on whether the construction is 2-core, 4-core, interpoled 4-core, coreless, slot-wound, salient poles, and many more configs and winding types. In particular cheap salient-pole motors can be wound directly with automated machinery while better slot-wound motors need to have the coils formed first, then inserted into the rotor slots, which is a manual process and complicated further by the fact that the coils are skewed to minimize torque ripple, no-one's really managed to automate that process yet.

So if you saw a factory making a mixture of salient-pole motors for toys and slot-wound motors for serious use you'd see exactly what TFA is describing, salient-pole automated, slot-wound with human operators.

If you want to see what real highly-automated Chinese manufacturing is like, look at one of Bunny Huang's videos on electronics assembly. Then for contrast look at the videos of how it's done in Pakistan.

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