cordless screwdrivers as motors ?

Just curious, there are cordless Screwdrivers with a max of 117Nm out there. When putting these on a gearbox it should be possible to get a good speed with high torque. My Makita does a max of 1200 rpm and is hard to stop by hand. This connected to a 10:1 gearbox should give enough torque.

Cordless drills are already geared. Have a think about it, a wiper motor is about 2 times the size of a cordless drill motor and they struggle to move.
The cost of making a proper gearbox for a cordless drill would outweigh the cost of just buying a 200W motor.

At one stage I was thinking of hooking up an old unused cordless drill (good drill buggered batterys) somehow to a pedal board on sliders and have powered adjustable pedals like some luxury cars have. Just press a button for different sized people kids and all, but gave up, too much for me!!

Actually the "gearbox" would just be two gears.
The advantages over winchmotors, not so loud and way faster.

check this out:


I even thought of using starter motors... they are not built for permanent motion but could work with good cooling:

Thanks for sharing that with us! It's given me ideas to build one for my daughter
I wouldn't have believed it if you hadn't posted the video. Starter motors sounds like an interesting idea actually as they can be sourced quite cheaply. The only thing is the cost of making a gearbox. Could do something with a bikes gears or along those lines.

I think the biggest issue for all these motors is they are great in one direction. As soon as you reverse polarity they would blow (with the exception of the drill) but it certainly would not switch direction fast enough to be considered.

@Alexey why would you do a gearbox for starter motors ? Starters for Otto motors do 40 to 100 rpm, for Diesel they do 100 to 200 rpm.
So both speeds should be fine for a 2DOF, the Diesel even better. I am more concened about the power consumption.
A Diesel starter with 1700W runs at a peak of about 142A. That means a good motor driver or as @Pit probably would suggest a good stack of MotoMonsters ;-)

After some research I am sure starter motors are just useful if you have one motor per direction and that would be too much for a 2DOF.
Though they might be a choice for my gyroscope plan.

Starter motors are designed for short use, not constant use, so they will wear out fast, not to mention they will drain a heck of a lot of power

Yes they are too energy hungry. Cooling them and having the right electronics will just increase the costs massively so they probably do not make sense. However you can get some used ones for just 1 EUR here, so it is easy to do experiments with them. At the end most of the DC motors used here are also not designed for instant direction change and somehow they seem to survive. There are also starter motors that are designed to run in both directions but they are not so common.

theres a reason why car batteries are CCA (cold cranking amps) from 200 to 800 CCA depending on car and starter motor. So if you can get decent movement from under 100 amps, you might be able to do something.
Starters are build to run at stall current and we run our current dc motors at stall current.
Just remember, depending on the starter, you will need a BIG car battery and an even BIGGER charger as CCA does not last long and puts an enormous train on the battery if you plan to use these motors for simulator use.
But hey, what do I know
Good luck

EDIT, nothing is designed for simulator use, not the motors, control boards or power supplies, but with careful set up, they run

Another thing what might be the issue is the motor back driving under the load. The worm gear motor will not move. We have that problem with wheelchair motors.

I didn´t get that far yet but I don´t get what you mean.
I planned to try wheelchair motors on the next project and I think they don´t behave different than a winch?

Im sorry i was wrong. This is a wheel chair motor gearing gearing diagram. They use worm gear motor but wannabeaflyer has got problems with Them. Check his post .
I just bought today 2x wheelchair motor very cheap as a starter so give me 2 weeks and i will have some progres

Mine have the simple "12V type gear" but are 24v, however there is no free-wheel but it isn´t required anyway afaik.
Turning back and forth with them is no problem, at least with the manual tests I did.

Starter motors are powerful, but i try and fail because the are with very low resistance my h bridge fried at the moment i try to spin the motor.

Starter motors are not recommended due to MASSIVE current needed