New motor faulty

This is a sort of research question.

A small motor burned out (3KW) the bearings seized and took out the windings, that plus multiple resetting of the overload.

I identified the motor was gone while the bearings were being replaced.
Of course I got the 'are you sure?' and 'it was only the bearings'
There was definitely doubt in their minds

I ordered a replacement and when it was fitted, I connected it up.
It failed to run. I only ran it a second or two to check direction.

I had checked the contactor and voltage at the panel terminals was ok prior
So this worried me.
A test of the motor circuit from the panel revealed an open circuit.

I checked the motor and one winding was open circuit.

Nobody believed me that the new motor was faulty.
The management thought I had been wrong all along - and the original motor was probably still good.

The motor supplier also thought I must have abused the motor somehow.

They brought a replacement with a sort of threat that they would charge for two if I was found negligent.

So the poor old sparky here was under a cloud from everyone.

I connected the new - new motor and all was fine (and still is)

The motor supplier sent it back to the manufacturer and they confirmed it was faulty.

Of course there was no 'you were right all along' conversation and the supplier said in all his years he had never seen a faulty new motor.
I too in 40 years have never had a new faulty motor.

So with the vast readership of this forum, I ask
Has any of you ever had a brand new motor still in the box be faulty?

A few drives, plc's, IO and many other things over the years. Never a motor though.

We have had a recent batch of Baldor motors with brakes, where the wire nuts for the brake coil were none existent. When the motors were installed it tripped the ground fault all the way back to the PDP. We now remove the fan covers and check and tape the coil connection.

But as far as a motor coil being open from the factory, nope.

We have had several New Servo Motors come in that were bad over the years.

I have had 5 "bad out of the box" motors over the years.
3 that had winding issues,
1 with a bad wire connection between a T lead and winding,
and 1 with the T leads miss labeled.

(1) 3 phase disconnect. blade broke the first time we used the disconnect.

motor - no

a good rule of thumb is if its going to burn up, it will do it within the first 30 days.

james

We have recently had a relatively big 250 kW motor burn out.
It was driving a fan via a VFD, so all kind of theories flew around. Myself I thought maybe the motor failed due to it not being VFD rated, and the insulation had degraded too soon because of that.
I had failed to connect the thermistor (cable was not ready when I was onsite) so everyone was sure that it was the "reason", that the motor had been overloaded for too long time. I argued that the motor model in the VFD would have protected the motor against this in any case.

On photos of the motor terminal box, I could see that all the wires coming out of the cable shoes and going to the motor windings had miscoloring and damage to the insulation. Worst was right near the cable shoes.
From that I concluded that the cable shoes had been pressed insufficiently; there had been excessive heatup at the cable shoes because of that, and this in turn had caused one wire to come compltely detached from the cable shoe causing an arc flash in the terminal box.

Supplier would not believe it despite of the photo evidence, and since the motor had been waiting several years before the startup, it was out of waranty so we had to have it rewound on our own expense.

So yes, motors can be defective upon supply from the original manufacturer. It was a big name brand manufacturer.

I once was involved in a project in which there were 4 x 600HP high pressure blowers, all operated by soft starters and my job was to commission the soft starters. They were, at that time, "black magic boxes" that nobody else understood, so LITERALLY everyone left the room when it came time to start them up. Naturally I started the first one and a big blue flame shot out of the bell housing of the brand new Siemens 600HP motor. Because the soft starter was the least understood device in the building, it HAD to be my fault and no matter how much I tried to explain that there is NOTHING that a soft starter could do to make that happen, it was falling on deaf ears. So on a hunch that all of the motors had been ordered and manufactured at the same time in the same place, I meggered the remaining 3 motors before anyone had energized them and sure enough, 3 out of the 4 were bad! I said that I meggered them because as it turned out, the Siemens tech that was sent to commission the motors did not know how to connect his megger!

We have had one 250 HP with a rotor bar broken (we suspect that the shipper dropped the motor off the fork truck but could not prove anything. No visible damage on the outside)

We have had 1 208V three phase motor that arrived as a single-phase 120V ... no problem except that we killed the capacitor on start since the wiring was wrong. That one seemed to be a labelling problem.

We have had one open winding where the weld 'missed'. The motor leads were in the right place, but the connection between .. I think it was T2 lead .. and the phase was simply not there. In our case the motor just failed to start. Similar to what you saw. When we sent it in for re-build the motor rewinder pointed out the problem, we authorized the fix, and the did an hour of work on it before shipping it back. Since it was in our warehouse for an unknown amount of time we didn't realize it was 'new'. The supplier likely still doesn't believe us.