Found a Pretty Thing today! - 1935 Westinghouse

Jul 27, 2018 2:40:01 GMT ckfan said:

Very nice! I love all of the extra features this one has. I’ve seen the drawers and the fold out tray. I’ve never seen the roll out shelf though. Very cool. The unit sounds healthy. Sounds just like any other westy I’ve ever heard. I would sum them up by saying that they are brutally fast to cool, short cycle like crazy once they are cool, and that the general construction of the cabinets and machines is not bad but not as good as GE was making. Especially when you compare the units to the scotch yoke compressor that GE had by this point. Then again this design was essentially 5 years old by this point. Westinghouse was an early adopter of hermetic fridges. They never built anything else to my knowledge. If you look back to 1930 and compare what they came up with to what GE had it starts to make more sense. They made due with what they could use (like GE having a patent on metal glass terminals) and they made a product that was cheaper to produce. Not to say that it was crap. Far from it. Just maybe not quite as refined as a GE. They used splash lubrication after all. Horror of horrors! That being said, I’ve never seen a float valve plug up and I’ve never seen the windings short out. Overall a very stout unit.

Jul 27, 2018 3:28:10 GMT coldspaces said:

That is a nice Westy!!. Be careful though I do believe those rubber insulated terminals have been know to short out. monitortop.freeforums.net/thread/939/test-refrigerators-get-spiders

That was a horrible deal for Travis!  He told me about it when we visited. That must have been horrible in the house. When Andrew and I broke his CK evaporator line, at least we were out in an open area more or less! Thankfully this Westy had R12 according to the tag.  The seller thought it had "ammonia" in it. LOL

While I was working on the CK and evacuating it, there was still SO2 residue.  It smelled awful in my shop. A friend stopped by and commented on how hideous it smelled.  Next week he stopped by after I had the CK working.  His comment was " Oh! I see you got the StinkyFridge working!"

So, today I started troubleshooting on this unit.  According to the previous owner, it leaked down and hasn't run since 1992. I was expecting to find an evaporator leak due to the oil in the cabinet, but apparently looks can be deceiving, as the troubleshooting revealed.

First order of business was to see if any pressure remained in the system. To that end, I needed to open the service port. This is a high-side float valve system, with the port on top of the float chamber.

Under the cap, there is a little copper seal disc.

And under that, is a slotted screw. Ewwww... It's all green, and corroded....

Thankfully, my Imperial hermetic service kit has the correct adapters for this.

I evacuated and charged it with R152A...

The wiring was horrendous. But, I did muster the courage to man up and plug it in! LOL

The result? It worked! There was frost after a few minutes and the evaporator got down to 20 degrees quickly.

Now a technical issue came up. The charging port is a strange design. It has a flat-bottom plug with a ball underneath it. This worked fine for pressure checking and evacuating, but the ball acted like a check valve and would not allow the charge to go in. I don't understand what moronic design decision could have led to this mess. To charge the unit for testing, I took the ball and screw out all together. After the testing, I tried out the new recovery machine I got at a flea market last week. There was no way to close off the port without the screw and ball in place.

To make this a usable service port for charging, I replaced the screw with a new one. The new one I drilled the end of to accept the ball. then, I peened the hole over so that the ball is captive in the end of the screw. With this design, the ball is lifted off the seat by the screw, and the port is open for flow in either direction when it's open. The service kit includes a hex bit which fits the new screw; so I am still able to open and close it with my Imperial kit.

After this, I removed the cooling unit for closer inspection.

It's so nasty!

Not anymore!

Is that a marking for 29 December, 1933 that I see on the tag? Upper left corner....

The condenser fan motor was running slowly and felt gummy and tight. So, I took it apart for cleaning and lubrication.

This motor is a two-phase motor. It uses the compressor motor as a rotary phase converter. After the compressor motor is running, its start winding creates a second phase for the fan motor. I re-varnished the winding, replaced the lead wires, and cleaned and re-oiled the oil wicks.

So this is how it sits tonight! Tomorrow will finish rewiring it and try to investigate further for the leak. I don't think the leak was in the evaporator. There is a space between the compressor deck and the evaporator, with some sort of foam board in there. I need to try to gain access to that space and see if there is some damage in there. Either that; or this is a "50 year leak" that I will never find.

I was talking to Travis off and on all day. He's pretty sure that this being a 1935 model, it would have originally had SO2 refrigerant. This was an R12 unit. It does have a "recertified" sticker on it, which to me, would indicate it was a factory rebuilt unit. It does look like the terminals have been replaced and new ones brazed in place on the compressor housing. Interesting stuff, indeed.

Jul 29, 2018 12:58:19 GMT birkie said:

Very cool. That "check valve" sure sounds annoying. I've been playing it over in my head, and can't see a point to it either. The float on the DR machines is so thoughtful with respect to servicing, even more so than the CK (as they lack the spring mechanism for opening the valve seat). But the westy sounds silly. You are sure getting good use of that adapter kit!

What do you suppose the advantage of the 2-phase fan motor might have been?

Thanks! Yes it was really annoying because I couldn't understand how no gas was flowing in. But - live and learn. That's one of the reasons this hobby is fascinating to me.

As for the 2-phase motor, it's hard to say. It's possible they were trying to get more power in a small size to fit in the space behind the compressor. If the motor was shaded pole, it would have to be larger to dissipate the extra heat that technology generates. They could have used a capacitor for a phase shift, like a regular PSC motor. But I guess the fact that the compressor motor was "right there" and generating a second phase all the time it was a logical choice.