[mburtis]

I'm always looking to learn about more companies that make good parts. Left over engineering brain I guess, I enjoy researching parts and thinking about the cool stuff I could build with them.

I had never heard of benshaw until this site, and everyone seems to sing their praises for drives. Are there contactors, etc top qaulity too?

There is of course the old names like Eaton, Allen Bradley, Sqaure D. I hate big corporate conglomerates like these guys have turned into but I imagine the parts are still good enough. Do these guys still make Nema designs. I doubt the qaulity and care matches the old days though.

Are there other independent American control manufactures that makes drives and starters, big control relays, etc still?

 

[Forge Boyz]

I had never heard of benshaw until this site, and everyone seems to sing their praises for drives. Are there contactors, etc top qaulity too?

I dont know about their drives; it's their softstarters that are what they built their name on. The contactors appear to me to be relabled LS, which to me is no better or worse than any other IEC stuff.
What stands out to me about them is their customer service. They will help you through troubleshooting ANY of their old stuff instead of just telling you it is obsolete.

Sent from my SM-G970U using Tapatalk

 

[jcaden]

For a great online selection, go to Automationdirect.com.

 

[460 Delta]

I'm always looking to learn about more companies that make good parts. Left over engineering brain I guess, I enjoy researching parts and thinking about the cool stuff I could build with them.

I had never heard of benshaw until this site, and everyone seems to sing their praises for drives. Are there contactors, etc top qaulity too?

There is of course the old names like Eaton, Allen Bradley, Sqaure D. I hate big corporate conglomerates like these guys have turned into but I imagine the parts are still good enough. Do these guys still make Nema designs. I doubt the qaulity and care matches the old days though.

Are there other independent American control manufactures that makes drives and starters, big control relays, etc still?

Eaton [Cutler Hammer] makes NEMA Rated starters now, not NEMA design. Think IEC with a NEMA size on it.
AB, break out your billfold.
Square D, still making them.
Siemens still makes the Furnas Innova series including the fraction sizes. The Innovas had a lot of parts interchangeability in them. A set of 1 3/4 size contacts could replace the contacts in a size 00, 0, 1, and 1 3/4 if it has ESP overloads, as they're the same frame size. The coil is the same from the 00 to the 2 1/2 size. Parts inventory can be kept low if you are willing to go slightly off label and "upgrade" smaller sizes to the max size that will fit in a frame size.
And before anyone says it, Furnas wasn't the only one who made fraction size starters, Cutler Hammer did also, in the Citation series, the size 1 1/2 for 5hp single phase motors.

 

[SWDweller]

When I worked for Eaton they had threatened to remove lots of motor starters from production.

Eaton A200 Series Contactors

Call 866-595-9616. Magnetic contactors are used to switch transformers and capacitors and to control electrical power circuits such as heating, lighting and motors that require no overload protection, or where overload protection is separately provided. They can be operated remotely by manual or...

www.klocknermoeller.com

The using the internal ordering system Vista, left over from Westinghouse days.
You could find up to 100 A series contactors on order at any one time. Might be months until they were built. Some old line industrial companies refused to change over from something that worked.
I was at the Mother Ship one February, Cherrington PA. when some idiot decided to shut down all of the US based tech support. The day after the announcement two private jets landed at the Pittsburgh air port with two CEO's on board. They politely told Eaton what they could do with off North American support.
One CEO had a 10 million a month account and the other one was 7 million a month. Accounts not to sneeze at. The idiot was terminated and the support staff was rehired some with raises.

So If you really want the old stuff you must get in front of someone who has VISTA access and they can look up to see the pricing and availability.

The A series were "bullet proof" in my experience for big motors in demanding conditions . Not true of some other starters I will be polite and not mention them.

 

[mburtis]

I just cant understand what goes through these new generation business managers heads. On one hand we have a reputation earned over decades of building rock solid reliable components. On the other hand we can obsolete all those, move factories out of the country, and make parts to fail every 5 years while we ride our grandfather's and father's reputation into the ground hoping we can retire rich before anybody notices we sold out.

 

[micromind]

From what I've seen over 31 years of industrial, mining, crush plants, concrete plants, asphalt plants and other 'high abuse' places, Allen Bradley NEMA (Model 509) will take the most abuse and keep asking for more......but it's $$$$$. I'm talking a size 2 (25 HP max) that has started and stopped a 40 HP conveyer, often loaded, maybe a dozen times a day for more than 10 years, and similar stuff like that.

Square D NEMA is pretty good too.

GE doesn't hold up well at all and I'm not impressed with C/H or Eaton. I don't have enough experience with other brands to make a valid call.

I always get the heater type O/Ls if it's my decision.

In my experience the brand of IEC stuff doesn't seem to make a difference, it all burns up about the same..........

Ice-cube relays, I like Allen Bradley but Schneiders Zelio has done well for me as well. I've used the AB 700HB 3 pole relays to control 3Ø 208 and 240 motors up to 1HP with no issues, some more than 20 years ago. Not much experience with other brands.

I like square D disconnect switches because you can unbolt the setscrew lugs and use crimps. I also like their QO and QOB (bolt-on) panels best.

I'm not even going to get into VFDs, they change so often it's pathetic..........All I'll say is if someone were to make a line of them that had 2 digital inputs, 2 digital outputs (relay type, not transistor) 1 analog in, 1 analog out and less than 50 parameter that are described on the front panel ( no numbers that you have to look up), I'd highly recommend them. Same hardware as their 10,000 parameter, 50 in/out models, just much simpler to hook up and program.

I don't like C/H (now Eaton) soft-starts. They seem to fail often and since they're the smallest size, they often cannot be replaced with a better brand. Also a lot of them only control 2 phases, B is just a busbar. If one of the SCRs fails, the motor is single-phased and the only way to shut it off is to turn off the breaks that feeds it. Seen more than one motor burn up this way. Bad, bad design.........

 

[gpop]

I came from a place that had 600 plus Allen Bradley 509's and over 17 years i have probably replaced 5 that were worn out. one of them cycled a every 2 minutes for 10 seconds running a lightly loaded 2hp heavy duty motor which accounted for 3 of the 5 starters.(we did pm service's on every starter at least once a year) During the same period i probably replaced 50 little iec starters of all brands which sucked as we only had 30-40 of them onsite. (No yearly service just ran them to failure)

In my current job over the last 2 years i have replaced 8 SqD nema style starters with melted contacts ranging in age from 1-4 years. Im not a AB fan boy but i have to say that the 509 is a beast compared to other brands i have work with.

 

[paulengr]

I'm always looking to learn about more companies that make good parts. Left over engineering brain I guess, I enjoy researching parts and thinking about the cool stuff I could build with them.

I had never heard of benshaw until this site, and everyone seems to sing their praises for drives. Are there contactors, etc top qaulity too?

There is of course the old names like Eaton, Allen Bradley, Sqaure D. I hate big corporate conglomerates like these guys have turned into but I imagine the parts are still good enough. Do these guys still make Nema designs. I doubt the qaulity and care matches the old days though.

Are there other independent American control manufactures that makes drives and starters, big control relays, etc still?

Most manufacturers, even more domestic companies like Benshaw, make surprisingly little. But they recognize three things. First is economy of scale. As an example most motor shops and even many pump companies will “rewind” a submersible pump motor for you. This is obvious BS because a submersible motor is several feet long and very narrow diameter. It takes very specialized winding equipment to do it and only a couple shops in the country have the capability. Similarly very few have in house capability to cut core steel to restack a core. And very few have large VPI tanks and ovens capable of handling anything over around 250-500 HP. Only a few have a clean room winding shop that can do over 4160. And then even with small electrical components like Klixxons and inertial switches, most actually buy them from a distributor that buys in bulk and stocks rewind shop specific parts, sort of the “supply house” for motor shops. There are good reasons for this. Our largest VPI tank at work for instance is 10 feet in diameter and 18 feet deep. This thing is ridiculously oversized if you are just winding a 50 HP bread and butter motor but if someone needs a 1000-20,000 chip mill motor for a paper mill rewound, that enormous VPI tank is necessary. It’s a VERY small business. There are only maybe a dozen rewind jobs of that size across the US per year. If another motor shop bought one the market would at best be half of what it is.

So manufacturers mostly tend to specialize in a niche and then they bolt on or private label everything else. That’s OK as long as they keep up with product quality of their suppliers…your name is going on the product. The problem comes in when they bid out a part and take the lowest bidder and don’t control quality. This gets harder to do as the company gets larger or depending on business philosophy. As an example Benshaw was owned by Regal Beloit not too long ago. To say the HVAC business is cut throat is an understatement. Regal is like Walmart…they ruthlessly cut costs and quality any way they can. Fortunately Benshaw is no longer owned by them.

I have no problems with Benshaw contactors. They are made in Spain or South Korea by the same company as their VFDs. They are private labeled to about a dozen different companies. There are less than 5 actual contactor manufacturers in the world as far as I can tell. Really when you get to more of the engineered products like if you buy a MV soft start or a pre packed drive, they build it the way I would build it so that makes me happy.

But that’s another point I’m making. The Benshaw RB2 is a 100% in house product. The EMX and CSX components are from another manufacturer in New Zealand but the stuff shows up as pieces and parts. Benshaw has to put it together. And the drives are prepackaged. They box them and send out manuals and do all the tech support. This is very typical of ALL manufactures. Even automotive companies pretty much are bolting on parts made by others. Even Intel and AMD are really just engineering firms. It is very easy if you know how to do it to submit a chip design and your credit card and get your own custom chips made.

Another one you may want to look at is Automation Direct. They make a lot of their electronic products themselves (PLCs, lots of instrumentation parts, but not drives or contactors). Koyo is a very old PLC manufacturer from the 80s but mostly rebranded their stuff until they bought AD to use as a direct channel to the US market. They also serve as an incubator and a lot of their products are US made by small mom and pop outfits. Dig into their web site and they are pretty up front about what it takes to be an AD manufacturer. They aren’t just distributors like a supply house.

Another reason to seek out suppliers is SOMETIMES the “factory direct” thing works out, sometimes it doesn’t. And you get some wildly stupid things happening. We have a dish washer plant customer. They had a dry transformer going bad. We got with Square D about a core and coil replacement. This means just changing the guts but reusing the enclosure and framing. I know the transformer business pretty well. Long story short they completely screwed this whole job up because of incompetence end to end. And after every promise that it was “their” transformer, it shows up with a label clearly identifying it as MGM, one of OUR suppliers. We could have fixed the whole mess if we just took care of the whole process ourselves if we knew they didn’t build it.

 

[mburtis]

I'm a huge automation direct fan. Most of the time if we need to replace a sensor or component of any kind they are my first stop. I've looked into host engineering who makes the do-more software and the brx plc. I'm always pleasantly surprised by the amount of us made stuff on the AD website.

 

[paulengr]

I came from a place that had 600 plus Allen Bradley 509's and over 17 years i have probably replaced 5 that were worn out. one of them cycled a every 2 minutes for 10 seconds running a lightly loaded 2hp heavy duty motor which accounted for 3 of the 5 starters.(we did pm service's on every starter at least once a year) During the same period i probably replaced 50 little iec starters of all brands which sucked as we only had 30-40 of them onsite. (No yearly service just ran them to failure)

In my current job over the last 2 years i have replaced 8 SqD nema style starters with melted contacts ranging in age from 1-4 years. Im not a AB fan boy but i have to say that the 509 is a beast compared to other brands i have work with.

509 is discontinued.

Threw issues with what you said. AC3 is only rated 12 starts per hour. That many starts makes it AC4. AC3 is typically 1 million starts where AC4 is a lot less. If you check the expected lifespan curves though you can get a lot more starts by going up on size.

Another issue is a NEMA “size” is close to an IEC frame size but there are3-4 IEC “sizes” in a frame. So most NEMA starters are grossly oversized. You can do the same thing with IEC. Just buy the biggest contactor for each frame size.

The final issue is except for mercury relays ALL contactors can weld. It’s just that usually the odds are pretty low. Contactors do not have an SCCR but most of them have a high chance of welding starting at around 30x rated size. Do so if the plant available short circuit rating is pretty high even a grounded motor can destroy the contactor. High X/R can also be a big issue. There are simple solutions to this. You need some kind of current limiting and adequate current limiting. If you are using fuses use class RK1 to replace RK5. Class CC and J also work. Don’t worry about “low peak” market speak. If you are using standard breakers switch to a motor specific breaker such as a manual moror starter or MCPs (in MCCs) or any other version of the various flavors of motor specific breakers. All have a special current limiting feature built in.

Like it or not NEMA style contractors were designed mostly about 70 years ago back when they were not built with the same materials or engineering of today. IEC is a newer and more “engineered” product so you don’t have the same ability to go beyond name plate specs. So it puts more on the end user to understand the application and the product.

 

[SWDweller]

Paulengr brings up a good point about cleanliness. I worked for a place where we could dip and bake up to a 2500hp synchronous motor. But the place had swamp coolers blowing to keep the room cooler. Management bent over backwards and tried to convince customers that it was fine.
Roll up doors, swamp coolers and a dirt/gravel yard. I knew immediately that we would loose all of the motor work to a company that had air conditioning and doors that sealed.
They build race car engines in clean rooms why would you want to have your motor rebuilt in a unclean room. Management seemed surprised when the work was lost.

 

[460 Delta]

509 is discontinued.

Threw issues with what you said. AC3 is only rated 12 starts per hour. That many starts makes it AC4. AC3 is typically 1 million starts where AC4 is a lot less. If you check the expected lifespan curves though you can get a lot more starts by going up on size.

Another issue is a NEMA “size” is close to an IEC frame size but there are3-4 IEC “sizes” in a frame. So most NEMA starters are grossly oversized. You can do the same thing with IEC. Just buy the biggest contactor for each frame size.

The final issue is except for mercury relays ALL contactors can weld. It’s just that usually the odds are pretty low. Contactors do not have an SCCR but most of them have a high chance of welding starting at around 30x rated size. Do so if the plant available short circuit rating is pretty high even a grounded motor can destroy the contactor. High X/R can also be a big issue. There are simple solutions to this. You need some kind of current limiting and adequate current limiting. If you are using fuses use class RK1 to replace RK5. Class CC and J also work. Don’t worry about “low peak” market speak. If you are using standard breakers switch to a motor specific breaker such as a manual moror starter or MCPs (in MCCs) or any other version of the various flavors of motor specific breakers. All have a special current limiting feature built in.

Like it or not NEMA style contractors were designed mostly about 70 years ago back when they were not built with the same materials or engineering of today. IEC is a newer and more “engineered” product so you don’t have the same ability to go beyond name plate specs. So it puts more on the end user to understand the application and the product.

You state that AB has dropped the 509 series. The Rockwell site says nothing of the sort, what’s your source? Do you have a link?


I sound like @oldsparky52

 

[micromind]

You state that AB has dropped the 509 series. The Rockwell site says nothing of the sort, what’s your source? Do you have a link?


I sound like @oldsparky52

I bought 2 509AADs (size 1, NEMA 1 enclosure 120AC coil) 3 weeks ago. They were in stock at the local AB supply house.

Their website lists several hundred 509 models as 'active'.

 

[John Valdes]

Paulengr brings up a good point about cleanliness. I worked for a place where we could dip and bake up to a 2500hp synchronous motor. But the place had swamp coolers blowing to keep the room cooler. Management bent over backwards and tried to convince customers that it was fine.
Roll up doors, swamp coolers and a dirt/gravel yard. I knew immediately that we would loose all of the motor work to a company that had air conditioning and doors that sealed.
They build race car engines in clean rooms why would you want to have your motor rebuilt in a unclean room. Management seemed surprised when the work was lost.

I worked for a motor and drive shop for a few years. We had a clean shop unlike most all of our competitors. The electronics shop was always spotless and cold. The guy that owned it was a neat freak. But there was only so much he could do with a plant full of people that never knew what a clean shop was. I would visit other shops and they were filthy.
Our shop had AC. Most of the others did not.

 

[John Valdes]

Oh...Benshaw was a very good option that our aggregate customers used. Weg and Toshiba motors. Benshaw and ABB drives and soft starts. I installed several Weg soft starts for aggregate customers as well.

 

[JRaef]

509 is discontinued.

Fake news. They have no plans on obsoleting it. They HAVE released a new "IEC NEMA rated" line of contactors, but it is just replacing an older line that they discontinued (the 300 line that hardly anyone used anyway). The 509 is the backbone of their MCCs, they are not going to poop in their own nest.

What they ARE in the process of ceasing to sell will be the old 592 eutectic melting alloy overload relays. Recent rules on hazardous materials makes it illegal for the solder inside of them to be used in any country that adheres to the "RoHS" rules (Reduction of Hazardous Substances). Rockwell (and anyone else still making them) can be fined if any of them make it into one of these countries, even if inadvertently. So although you will still be able to buy replacement Type W heater elements if you have them installed already, you will not be able to buy NEW overload relays that accept them any longer.

Benshaw makes a good soft starter, they have for years, I used to work for them, they were very serious about making a good soft starter product. Benshaw recently bought Aucom, a company in New Zealand that makes Soft Starters too (and brand-labeled them to Danfoss), so the "newer" versions of the Benshaw soft starters are actually the Aucom designs, but those are good too. I know the founder of Aucom personally, he is a very conscientious engineer and all around great guy.

The Benshaw contactors, starters and VFDs are all brand-labeled from Lucky Goldstar in Korea, better known as "LG" for appliances, TVs etc. LG changed their industrial product line name to "LS" (for Luckygoldstar Systems), but it's the same corporation. Years ago at a trade show when Benshaw first released the line, they made a claim to me that they "had invested thousands of man-years of engineering development in creating this new line of contactors". I pointed out that I knew they were just brand-labeling LG, they said "Well yes, but it's an exclusive deal for North America. I was working for a competitor at the time (Motortronics) and just 3 weeks before that, LG had approached us with an "exclusive" right to brand label the exact same contactors and starters. You can also buy those components direct from LS Electric America in Illinois, Franklin Electric (the pump company, who bought out Cerus Industrial that was brand labeling the LS line), and on-line resellers FactoryMation and Wolf Automation. Apparently someone at LG was unfamiliar with the term "exclusive"...

 

[micromind]

Fake news. They have no plans on obsoleting it. They HAVE released a new "IEC NEMA rated" line of contactors, but it is just replacing an older line that they discontinued (the 300 line that hardly anyone used anyway). The 509 is the backbone of their MCCs, they are not going to poop in their own nest.

What they ARE in the process of ceasing to sell will be the old 592 eutectic melting alloy overload relays. Recent rules on hazardous materials makes it illegal for the solder inside of them to be used in any country that adheres to the "RoHS" rules (Reduction of Hazardous Substances). Rockwell (and anyone else still making them) can be fined if any of them make it into one of these countries, even if inadvertently. So although you will still be able to buy replacement Type W heater elements if you have them installed already, you will not be able to buy NEW overload relays that accept them any longer.

How will this affect the 609 line (manual motor starters that use the heater type O/Ls)?

 

[paulengr]

Fake news. They have no plans on obsoleting it. They HAVE released a new "IEC NEMA rated" line of contactors, but it is just replacing an older line that they discontinued (the 300 line that hardly anyone used anyway). The 509 is the backbone of their MCCs, they are not going to poop in their own nest.

What they ARE in the process of ceasing to sell will be the old 592 eutectic melting alloy overload relays. Recent rules on hazardous materials makes it illegal for the solder inside of them to be used in any country that adheres to the "RoHS" rules (Reduction of Hazardous Substances). Rockwell (and anyone else still making them) can be fined if any of them make it into one of these countries, even if inadvertently. So although you will still be able to buy replacement Type W heater elements if you have them installed already, you will not be able to buy NEW overload relays that accept them any longer.

Benshaw makes a good soft starter, they have for years, I used to work for them, they were very serious about making a good soft starter product. Benshaw recently bought Aucom, a company in New Zealand that makes Soft Starters too (and brand-labeled them to Danfoss), so the "newer" versions of the Benshaw soft starters are actually the Aucom designs, but those are good too. I know the founder of Aucom personally, he is a very conscientious engineer and all around great guy.

The Benshaw contactors, starters and VFDs are all brand-labeled from Lucky Goldstar in Korea, better known as "LG" for appliances, TVs etc. LG changed their industrial product line name to "LS" (for Luckygoldstar Systems), but it's the same corporation. Years ago at a trade show when Benshaw first released the line, they made a claim to me that they "had invested thousands of man-years of engineering development in creating this new line of contactors". I pointed out that I knew they were just brand-labeling LG, they said "Well yes, but it's an exclusive deal for North America. I was working for a competitor at the time (Motortronics) and just 3 weeks before that, LG had approached us with an "exclusive" right to brand label the exact same contactors and starters. You can also buy those components direct from LS Electric America in Illinois, Franklin Electric (the pump company, who bought out Cerus Industrial that was brand labeling the LS line), and on-line resellers FactoryMation and Wolf Automation. Apparently someone at LG was unfamiliar with the term "exclusive"...

https://www.mc-mc.com/Product/allen-bradley-500f-bod930?option=allen-bradley-500f-bod930

$516.33 for a 27 A Bulletin 500F contactor. Granted this is a retail price. The real price will be about 10-15% less or about $450.

Considering this contactor is under $50 in an IEC style from everybody, although they haven’t labeled it as obsolete yet they’ve priced it that way. You can still buy a SLC too. Each one hand built…

AB started selling Sprecher and Schuh overloads with the terminals matching Bulletin 500 terminal spacing decades ago to replace eutectic overloads. At this time they also raised prices and continued to raise prices on the Bulletin 500s well above market prices. They started with the Bulletin 300 as a mostly direct 500 replacement and now have issued another similar one but with a reduced form factor and price. For a while they sold the Bulletin B100 which was the Reliance contactor but quickly killed it.

As far as the MMS they have a couple ways they can go. They already sell the Sprecher and Schuh IEC style MMS. They long ago replaced the Eaton MCP with the ABB ones. Either can work.

The evil part about RoHS is that say I sell eutectic overloads exclusively in North America and only sell bimetallic in RoHS companies. If say a US plant goes out of business and the plant equipment is sold at auction, then ends up bought on the used market and imported by someone else and then gets disposed of later on in that country, if I do business in that country, I have to eat the hazardous waste disposal costs plus taxes (”fines”). The only way to avoid it is NEVER do business in those countries. Then they can’t touch you. This is what any sane manufacturer should have done but it’s impossible to avoid for a multinational. The problem is not limited to just eutectic overloads. All lead-tin solder has to be silver solder which is why all electronics now has a roughly 10-15 year life. Nobody has perfected silver solder joints exceeding 15 years on power connections equal to or even approaching lead tin.

AuCom has private labeled for years. Teco is another brand name. Also Emerson bought SAFTronics, private branded the AuComs as the “Opal drive” then shut down the SAFTronics facility essentially in the next town over from Phasetronics/Motortronics.

More recently Regal Beloit either pissed off or RIFed a lot of Benshaw people. A couple were pretty high level. They expected them to just retire but often this does not happen. The ex-employees ended up setting up shop down the street as “AuCom America” and became a huge competitive threat to Benshaw. Once Regal was out of the picture, Benshaw immediately acquired AuCom America.

The EMX and CSX phase stacks and some other parts are made in New Zealand. They are shipped here as pieces which are then assembled into a final soft start for retail. I haven’t seen what arrives in raw form but I know that for instance the bus bar assemblies had to be machined domestically. Part of this determines whether you get to label it as US made and part has to do with tariffs…parts have a different tax from finished goods. To qualify ICE is pretty picky. If all you do for manufacturing is put a label on it or some other very minor steps, that does not count.

Software wise the CSX is similar to an ABB PST or Altistart…it is very quirky and meant strictly as a cheap pump controller. It’s an extremely low price point, down where SAFtronics used to be when they existed. The EMX4 is pretty nice. It has a lot of very cool features like adaptive starting curves for torque control and a test/simulation mode and lots of presets to help newbies. I can set one up much faster than the older Benshaw MX controllers. That being said it doesn’t have a 7th SCR for braking or a fiber version for MV or some other quirks. So the MX is still necessary for specialty applications. Benshaw is trying to merge the software designs but the programmers quite literally don’t speak the same language.

 

[JRaef]

How will this affect the 609 line (manual motor starters that use the heater type O/Ls)?

For the time being, they are still leaving them available. But they are "on the "list of products containing greater than 0.1% by weight of one or more substance of very high concern (SVHC) as defined by the REACH regulation"... so they cannot be used on anything that is going to be exported to Europe.