U.S. Motors was expected to begin quoting the new vertical in October. Source: Nidec Motor Corporation

Q. Tell me about the product you rolled out at WEFTEC.

A. It’s the 6813 Vertical WPI and WPII. So there’s the WPI version, which is the standard open version, the WPI defined by our NEMA standard. And WPII is an additional feature you can add to the WPI for ingress protection, protection against environmental factors like dust and things like that.

Q. What makes this a big deal?

A. What we’re really doing with this product is we’re creating a large horsepower cast-iron frame and end bracket vertical motor. All current motors around this size are made by fabricated steel. It’s basically taking a bunch of different components of steel and then welding them together to create a frame and to create your end brackets. On ours, the 6813 has a cast frame and a cast upper and lower end bracket. So we’re basically taking a couple hundred parts and moving it down to three for our assembly, so it makes our manufacturability go way up. We can deliver it to the customers a lot quicker. But also, since you’re going down from a hundred or so different parts and welding together, to three, the variability goes way down. You get the same consistency on each frame each time when you put them together.

Q. What kind of thrust are you getting out of this particular model?

A. We’re actually using the proven thrust bearings from our previous model that have some of the highest thrust capabilities in the market for vertical motors, because U.S. or Nidec Motors is one of the leaders in vertical motors. When Nidec purchased U.S. Motors, we took that and we’ve been running with that. Our thrust bearings, we’ve proven the design and how they are incorporated into that upper bracket, and we get the most thrust in the market on most of our frame sizes.

Q. Do the two different versions of this vertical come in different abilities or sizes?

A. They’d be the same frame and end bracket. The WPI is what we call our base. It’d be an upper bracket, a lower bracket and a frame. What we call “wings,” they’re extra bolt-on features that you put on the side that connect to the intake of the motor. It basically gives a couple of 90 degree turns for the intake air to go around, to slow down and depressurize so it drops particulates or dust or things like that out of the air. So that’s the difference between the WPI and the WPII.

If you look at our U.S. Motors, our Nidec verticals, they’re quite noticeable because of the wings on WPIIs. They’re just a bolt-on feature and that slows that air down, reduces the velocity so it drops the dust out of the air.

Q. So, this updates the existing 5813 product?

A. This is basically building on that. Since Nidec bought us we’ve been expanding, and that’s exactly where U.S. Motors is going — expanding our lines, our vertical lines. We’re going up. We came out last year with the 5812, which is a TFC version of a higher horsepower. Now, what’s next is to keep going higher in horsepower and providing better and more reliable products to the industry.

Q. What kind of horsepower are you getting out of the new one?

A. We just did a test today, and it’s a 2,000 horsepower 8 pull, which we have to do testing to scale that up, but right now we’re at 2,000 horsepower 8 pull.

Q. A lot of my market goes to NGWA. Is this a product people will be able to see there?

A. Absolutely. We’ll have the literature and everything there. We’ll probably have more than we have now.

Q. Anything you want to add?

A. To give you a little bit bigger of a rundown of the 6813, basically what we did is we needed to increase our horsepower. So we came up with a new cooling intake design. That allowed us to get a lot of our higher-horsepower 8,000 frame designs into a smaller frame. So we redesigned the frame — we have this new cast iron frame, upper end bracket and lower end bracket — and we basically lowered the footprint for a lot of the higher horsepower that we offer.

Also, what we were looking at that we’ve seen in the industry is that all of these higher-horsepower, especially vertical motors has such a long lead time to the customer. So we said, how can we fix this problem? We put our heads together and said, well if we get away from this fabricated frame with all these welded parts, we can decrease the lead time. So that’s what we do. Instead of having these 100 parts that we put together, we have three, and we decrease the lead time to the end user. So that kind of puts it back into the pump manufacturer’s court and saying, how quickly can we get a pump system to the end user?

Jeremy Verdusco is editor of National Driller.