Taycol

These motors were made by a small engineering company on the south coast of England, run by Messrs Taylor and Collis, and were popular in UK model shops between about 1950-1970. This site provides a quick overview and some installation information about them, in the hope that this will encourage their continued use in vintage craft... Modellers may... sometimes come across what looks nowadays like an odd item of machinery. An open-frame motor made of iron, brass and paxolin, with very distinctive coil(s) of (usually) red varnished copper wire attached to the frame. It will be very heavy due the solid mass of iron and copper, as well as the thick brass spacers holding the paxolin plates apart. It will have a mass of wiring connectors on one end-plate and, if you are lucky, a stamped name on the end-plates or brass feet. If it's attached to the propeller shaft of an old model boat, there is a good chance that this is an open-frame field-wound electric motor for model boats from the British manufacturer Taycol. We usually associate small electric motors with DC supplies and permanent magnets. This has not always been the case. Though Faraday originally demonstrated the motor effect with DC current back in 1830, poor battery technology held DC motor development back, and the early practical motors tended to be commercial AC units, which became available around 1890, and were typically field-wound to generate the required rotating magnetic field. Early DC motors also suffered from a lack of understanding of the magnetic flux circuit, and from the low performance of permanent magnets of the time, so that it was not unusual for electric motors to be unreliable starters you will find comments in adverts of the time extolling the starting reliability of market-leading motors like the Mighty Midget up to the late 1950s. Before about 1900 small DC electric motors were primarily curiosities. This site gives a good example of middle and late 1800s electric motor technology. You can see that field windings are the norm, and ...Read More