I occassionally don’t just work on VFDs. My new to me Sheldon 13″ lathe had a 115/230V single phase motor with 6 leads coming off the motor. To reverse direction you need to reverse lead 5 and 8. Of course the previous owner did not want to wire it up or could not, so it only started in one direction. Here is what the motor tag looked like…

I dug through my box of switches and came across a drum switch which was rated for the 1.5HP Dayton motor. Here is the shot of the wiring diagram from inside the cover of the drum switch…

Now to make sense of both diagrams, I wrote everything down on paper drawing out the drum switch schematic in both forward and reverse to help me visualize. The lower section is the leads at the motor.

Hope this helps someone else out there. I found other schematics for the low voltage wiring but the high voltage (230) was not available online.

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Filed under: Other Stuff - @ October 24, 2025 8:58 pm