It's hard to answer some of the questions Mike. You probably know more about sealed units & air conditioning units because you do so many of them. Sparks don't seem to be a problem for some reason. People use torches and plasma cutters to cut open the sealed units. You see it on the youtube videos.

I think you would want to cut either above -or- below the weld line. The metal at the weld line is much thicker and harder. That's a place to avoid cutting if you can. It might ruin your blades.

I tried a cermet circular saw blade for cutting open a couple of 275 gallon fuel barrels last month. That worked REALLY well. I guess the cermet is like some kind of super tough carbide blade ? Anyhow .... it didn't make sparks and made fast work of it.

I've used Diablo sawzall blades before. They are good blades but i think all the fancy Diablo stuff is just advertising. The other brands are good. The Ace Hardware brand is what i use but i'm mostly cutting soft metals these days.

It wouldn't hurt to try a carbide sawzall blade. Maybe it would work better for your purposes. We all have our own way of doing things. It's trial end error to see what works best for you personally.

I watched a youtube video where the guy processed a sealed unit in about five minutes yesterday. I guess he hit on a way of doing things that works well for him and wanted to share it with everybody else.

It's hard to say with any electric motor these days. I'm seeing a lot more with aluminum windings now. The aluminum wound ones are cheaper to make but they don't seem to hold up like a copper wound one does.

Maybe it's like that with sealed unit motors too. A cheap window ac unit that was bought at the big box store probably wouldn't have the quality of build as the higher price brand name one.



Experience will probably be the best teacher. Do enough sealed units and you'll eventually figure out which brands use copper and which ones use aluminum. I would imagine that the larger central unit ones would be more likely to have copper windings. Central AC's aren't cheap to buy.