Does anyone have good or bad experience with Namiki gear motors. I have had two Namiki gear motors fail in our electrical discharge machine in the last year. I don't know if I have another factor causing these motors to fail, or if they're just cheap gear motors.

There are always cheap cube relays posted on eBay. If you don't have an account for your business, you probably should. I think the liquidation of some many facilities after the economic downturn has led to an abundance of new and used industrial components and parts for sale. It's a buyer's market on there, there are cheap relays galore.

It looks to me like energizing one coil move the wiper in one direction, and energizing the other coil moves it in the other direction. May it was used for speed control or acceleration?

Looks like an industrial timer for the 1960's or 1970's. Chances are that Industrial Solid State Controls has gone under or has been bought out. The only way to know for sure is from someone with first hand knowledge.

Anyone able to make a custom remote pot timer? I would like to see the schematic if so. I think it could be easily accomplished using a PLC so if you have one in your equipment you may be able to program a remote pot timer using an analog input for the potentiometer.

Koyo makes maintenance friendly PLC's. They are definitely a cheaper PLC than most other brands, but they are easy to use i think. They can be bought at quite a few places online like http://plcproducts.com/koyo. And you can find plenty of info about them on the official Koyo PLC website: http://www.koyoele.co.jp/english/product/plc/.

I don't want to sound like an advertisement but I think they are underrated PLC's.