Bearing Failure Leads to Cooked Winding

I ran across a failed capacitor start motor on an air compressor recently. It is obvious that the start winding got barbecued (see picture).

A student asked me how I knew right off that it was the start winding.  Notice that the winding which is burned has smaller gauge wire than the winding that appears OK. The start winding in single phase motors is constructed of smaller gauge wire than the run winding and has fewer turns. It is tempting to call this an electrical failure after seeing the cooked winding. However, most motor failures can be traced back to bearing failures.

Disassembling the motor we saw that the rotor had been dragging – a sure sign of bearing failure. (see picture)

The lead end bearing was to blame in this case. You can see that the dragging all took place on the lead end of the motor. Taking a close look at the stator you can see where the rotor has been rubbing the stator. (see picture)

This can cause two types of winding failures: one where the rotor knocks some of the metal layers into the slots where the windings are, and another where the rotor stays magnetically locked down at startup, which is what I believe happened here. Even though the rotor turns easily by hand and there is no play that can be casually observed by hand, it is obvious the bearing was allowing the rotor to touch the stator. If this happens on startup, the reaction will be like two magnets with opposite polarity pulling together. The motor will lock down, draw high current, and heat up.