Bay one
Electric motor repair, rewinding and rebuilding
AC and DC, single source, up to 15 tons on the crane. Stripped, rewound to EASA AR100-2015, rebuilt, and test run at no load to 4160 volts with bearing temperatures and balance readings written down before it ships.
Chapter 01
What comes off the truck is rarely a mystery once it's open
Most motors that come through the door on Campbell Avenue have already told the counter most of what's wrong before a wrench touches them. Single phasing burns two windings dark and leaves the third close to new, because the motor kept trying to run on what was left. Bearing failure shows up as a scored shaft and a stator bore that's taken a hit from a rotor that's no longer running true. Contamination reads as a winding packed with grease, cement dust or corrosive wash-down residue, depending on which Arizona plant it came out of. Insulation breakdown is the quiet one: no obvious burn mark, just megohm readings that keep sliding until the motor trips on ground fault at 2am.
None of that is guesswork once the frame is off and the end turns are visible. Reading a winding correctly is what decides whether a motor gets rewound to spec or whether Bestway calls Tucson and says it's not worth it. Ray Kothe has been making that call since 1978.
A rewound stator standing open in its steel housing, fresh copper coils laid into the slots, photographed at Bestway Electric Motor Service in Tucson
Rewound and rebuilt to EASA AR100-2015, not to a shortcut
The old winding comes out in the burnout oven, not with a torch or a cold strip that stresses the core. Bestway complies with EASA Standard AR100-2015 Recommended Practices specifically because burnout temperature and time are the two variables that decide whether the laminations survive the process or come out annealed and soft, quietly costing the rebuilt motor efficiency it never gets back. New coils go in and get laced by hand, then the stack goes through the varnish tank and the bake oven so the insulation system cures the way it's rated to, not the way a rushed schedule would prefer.
Rotors get dynamically balanced and, where the job calls for it, welded and machined back to tolerance in house rather than farmed out. Motors up to 15 tons move through this line on Bestway's own crane, which is the ceiling on what the shop can take on at all, single source, whether the customer is a mine, a municipality, a utility, a manufacturer or a military installation.
Proved on the stand before it ever ships
A rebuilt motor goes onto the test stand and gets run at no load up to 4160 volts, on a 6 by 12 foot bedplate in an isolated testing area away from the rest of the shop floor. Bearing temperatures and balance readings get recorded during that run, not eyeballed and waved through. That number on paper is what tells the counter the rebuild is sound before it goes back on a truck to Tucson, Phoenix or wherever it's headed next, instead of finding out on the customer's own line.
Surge, hipot, ground, insulation resistance and infrared thermal imaging
Each test proves a different failure mode, which is why Bestway runs all five rather than picking one. Surge testing finds a weak turn-to-turn insulation gap before it becomes a short. Hipot testing proves the winding can hold voltage against ground without breaking down. A ground test confirms there's no unintended path to the frame at all. Insulation resistance, the megohm reading, tracks how the winding is aging over time rather than just whether it passes today. Infrared thermal imaging finds a hot connection or an uneven load on a running motor before it ever gets to the point of smoke.
The right time to ask for one of these is before a motor fails, not after it's already down and the line is stopped. A megohm reading taken during a planned outage is a maintenance record. The same reading taken during an emergency call to (520) 884-9141 is a post-mortem.
Bestway Electric. Arizona ROC 180818 and ROC 296811, EASA member. Estimates typically follow teardown within 7 to 10 business days. Call (520) 884-9141.
Two motors on the bench most weeks came in with nothing more written down than a nameplate and a story: Joe Durham's single phase 7.5 hp GE motor, and Kevin Collins's Baldor buffer, both worked at 728 S Campbell Ave and both back in service. Bring the nameplate and what it was doing when it quit.