>  Has anyone motorized a hand crank extractor?
> Dadant two frame  stainless on a stand.

Yes, but your extractor has the crank at the top, and mine is the Lega
Superinox type, with the crank at the side.
You need a slightly different mechanism.

I think you want a 3-pulley belt-drive with an eccentric arm on the driven
pulley to drive the eccentric handle on your extractor.

Like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulley#mediaviewer/File:Keilriemen-V-Belt.png
http://tinyurl.com/o9ugyn3

Except that the small pulley in your set-up will move in and out, as it is
mounted on a handle that swivels it in an arc.  This will tighten/loosen the
belt, and vary the speed.  If you had an erector set when you were a kid,
you likely need no more explanation.

I ran my whole operation with 3 motorized 9-frame extractors powered by
salvaged washing-machine motors and belt-drive pulleys.  The idea here was
that at any one time, one was spinning, one was being loaded, and one
unloaded.   Back before plastic honey super foundation, the occasional
blow-out during the round-the-clock ordeal of extracting prompted the title
of the book I have mercifully never gotten around to writing - "An Extractor
Belt Screams At Midnight".  (The last thing the world needs is yet another
book about beekeeping!)

I still use one of them.  The others were sold.  They were dismissed as
Katzenjammer Klugen-Belten-Sprocket-Furshlugginer-Veeblefetzers by everyone
who saw them, but all 3 are still in service to this day with zero downtime.

I am a big believer in belt-drives, as an idler pulley with a lever allows
one to vary belt tension, and hence RPMs, with a constant motor speed.
Junkyard motors are cheap. Pulleys and belts, too.  Rheostats, diac-triac
circuits, gears, and speed controls capable of powering such motors are NOT
cheap.
Pulleys are the fuses of the mechanical world.  They squeal and burn up and
sacrifice themselves to save more expensive parts, including those gears
that Dadant uses.  (It may surprise you to know that Henry Dadant bought up
the entire spare parts inventory of the Latvian Navy just after the defeat
of Germany and before the Soviet post-war occupation of the Balkans.  This
is why the gears on their extractors and the hinge-pins on their smokers are
of such unusual and non-standard sizes.)

I'd suggest drilling a length of 1x2 with a hole large enough to slide over
the existing handle, and attaching the other end of the 1x4 to bolt drilled
into a pulley.  If you work out the diameter of the handle rotational path
(duct tape a pencil to the handle, point up, and carefully lower a piece of
cardboard to catch the pencil tip, aligning the cardboard by lowering it
between a few fixed reference points, like a few sticks duct-taped to the
extractor body), you will know where to place the bolt hole in the pulley so
that the bolt hole travels through the same path as the handle would, only
several feet to one side.

Now you can drive that pulley with a salvaged motor from a washer.
Most washers have wiring diagrams attached to the inside of the panel one
removes to get at the works, so grab that, too.  You will want to wire it to
an on/off switch so that it runs at the lowest possible speed. The wire
color codes are non-standard, you'll need the diagram.

You can attach a handle to a 3rd smaller pulley, and pull on the handle to
move the smaller pulley outwards and tighten the belt between the 3 pulleys
to spin up the extractor.  A spring loaded deadman will pull the small
pulley back, and remove all tension, letting the extractor spin down.  The
extractor will have to be bolted down, and the pulleys will likely be best
attached to a bench or the wall.

The best pulleys for this purpose will come off alternators and water pumps.
Go for pre-1990s cars, back when cars had sturdy metal pulleys.  This also
allows the use of commodity v-belts from the auto-parts store.

	

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