I was wondering if it would be feasible, to put a plug in on the pedal on the pac bay power wrapper, so you could remove it if needed. i was working with my ag teachers wrappers, and he mainly just uses the wrappers to dry epoxy, but i found the foot pedal to be cumbersome, and in the way. i think it would be nice to be able to remove the foot pedal, but i wanted to see if any of you "old timers" have worked with a removable pedal. And if was a pain or a godsend. Thank You.

Drew Lampe

That what I did with no problems so far.

Drew,
I have several different lathes, wrappers and motors. I use plugs on all of them for both motors as well as foot pedals.

The plug that I use is either a 2 conductor or 3 conductor trailer plug. These plugs are redily obtained in a pair - i.e. matching color coded plugs for each connection from auto supply stores or some hardware stores.

Some power wrapper foot pedals have two, three or possibly 4 conductors to connect the pedal to the motor. Just purchase a plug and socket set to match the number of wires in the cord.

I like to use heat shrink tubing for the wire connections. So, I simply chop off the pedal, leaving about 2 feet of wire at the motor. I like to have the connector near the motor. Then, strip back the wire and separate the conductors on both ends of the wire.

I then slip a 4 inch larger section of heat shrink tubing over the pedal end of the wire and slide it well down the wire. Then, I slip on about a 3 inch section of each wire as I splice it. Strip back each end , solder and splice each wire. Then, I take the 3 inch heat shrink over the splice and use a heat gun or alchol burner to shrink the tubing. After all of the conductors have been spliced. I take the longer larger heat shrink tubing and slide it over all over all of the spliced connections. If done correctly, the larger heat shrink will completly cover all of the splices back to the original outercoating of the wire to make a smooth seamless splice.

Take care
Roger

p.s.
If you find the need, this is also a good time to extend the length of the wire going to the foot pedal. Some power wrappers don't have a long enough wire to conviently move the pedal to the area of the rod when working on a very long rod.
The cleanest and neatest way to do this is to take the foot pedal apart, remove the original wire, and connect a wire of the length needed, before adding the plug. That way you only have the plug connection at the end of the wire.