Of course you can purchase motors online, but you can get them for a much reduced price (usually) if you’re lucky enough to have thrift stores in your area like the Goodwill. As an extra bonus, you can often scavenge things from your thrift store purchases that are worth more than what you paid for the item.
For instance, I often scavenge switches, power adapters, batteries, connectors, speakers, magnets, LEDs, etc. from toys and tools I get at the thrift stores.
But let’s get back to drills for sources of motors. Doing that can work great, but I found a few pitfalls that you might want to watch out for.
Here is a cordless drill like one that I scored from the Goodwill for $4.99. I though it was a great price for a strong, low voltage, dc motor. I was wrong.
It had a charger with it that I thought would be worth the price of the drill alone. But to my surprise, its output was 3.6 VAC — that’s AC folks. And you don’t usually want an ac power brick for most of your projects. So that wasn’t the great advantage I thought it was going to be. But I did get the motor out of it. More on that in a minute.
And then I found another cordless drill that did not have a charger with it, but it stated on its label that it required a DC charger. So I bought it partially for the motor and partially to take it apart to see if it different guts than the AC-charged other one.
But neither one is that great because I think the motors require too much current. At least my little 500 milli amp power supply won’t run them.
You might need a torx screwdriver to get these apart. I had some bits which worked great for most screws.
But one screw was too deep so luckily I had a torx screwdriver. The most common size is a #10.
I think it’s better to go for the 12 volt cordless drills — they require 1 to 3 amps but you can get power supplies that will supply that current easier than you can find 3 volt supplies for the smaller cordless drills that will supply amps of current.