Motors for Haunt and Halloween Props

There has been a lot of talk about the shortage of electric motors for Halloween prop building since the supply of surplus wiper motors and vent motors has dried up.   For the January meeting of CalHaunts I put together the equivalent of a 10th grade science project to demonstrate some potential haunt prop motors.   After visiting all the usual sources of surplus parts (That post is coming) I gathered what I thought were the best candidates for electric motors to build into props.  Most are 12 volts and less than $20 dollars for the motor.

The benchmark project in mind was the classic Flying Crank Ghost.  Motors needed to be strong enough and slow enough to replace the $50 motor specified by phantasmechanics.

What we ended up with was 7 motors that seem to be good prop building candidates.  Six motors are 12 volts and one is 110 AC.  To demonstrate the available torque I modified each motor to accept a 6" crank arm and tested it using an 8 once weight.

To deal with motors with high RPM, I demonstrated two inexpensive PWM modules available from ebay.com to control motor speed.  (More information on Pulse Width Modulation controllers in a later post.)

Over the next few days I'll do a more detailed post on each motor.

Note:  Thanks to Dennis Griesser (of Wolfstone fame) for these photos and all the closeup photos of motors to come.  (Dennis - Could you please Photoshop away 20 pounds from me next time?)