I’m not familiar with that particular VFD, but the spindle looks like a normal Chinese spindle that most of us have.
As long as the VFD can take a PWM signal, you should be good to go.
There may be some difficulty programming the VFD since a lot of us have HY VFDs, but it’s not super complicated and we can help.
You might consider Mechatron, they’re the ones I went for with my Nomad (I’m in Switzerland) and I’m happy.
If you send them an email, they’ll send you a quote for a full package with everything you need. You can also buy from their shop or from Sorotec. I went with the quote from them directly because I wanted the “professional” HFP spindle.
They sell both air and water cooled spindles. One nice feature is that at least when you order directly, the VFD comes preconfigured, so all you need to do is wire it (which is a bit of a pain but you have to do it for any spindle).
Mechatron looks really good. I just wrote them. Doesn’t seem like they have a 1.5kw 65mm air-cooled spindle though. Maybe I should just go for a water-cooled one?
That Avid set looks amazing!
I would go water cooled. You can run with a pretty small water cooling setup and upgrade if you find you’re running hot. A small setup could be a pond pump in a bucket, or a small PC cooling setup.
I’m late to the party sorry, but pretty much everything has been said.
I bought a G-Penny kit (story around that here, and about programming it here. Don’t be afraid by the pages of params, I just wanted to be super thorough, but in reality you’ll only have to tune a couple of parameters and off you go).
Runout on those chinese spindles is supposedly hit and miss, but either I got lucky or the runout is statistically small enough to not have to care about it. Mine was as advertised.
Water-cooled vs air-cooled: I would go water-cooled again, no doubt, but that is down to personal preference. The quietness is what I was after, but I found that water-cooled has a second interesting side effect: you can run the spindle arbitrarily slow, e.g. 100 RPM if you want to. Granted, there are not many situations that call for sub-5000 RPM, but it’s still useful to have this capability. With an air-cooled spindle you need to set a minimal RPM to ensure a proper cooling airflow. I also like the absence of downdraft from the spindle onto the piece.
Power: 2.2kW is definitely overkill, 800W appears to be nice and plenty enough for wood, and 1.5kW is probably the sweet spot that covers everything. On a regular Shapeoko3 I would have said go 800W, on a Pro with the extra rigidity I think 1.5kW makes sense.
I wish there was an option for a water-cooled spindle with a quick tool change mechanism like on @WillAdams’s Mafell
If you can afford a Mechatron, then that defnitely looks like a good choice to remove the randomness of the “shopping on Ali” experience.
@Julien I’ve just written Mechatron. I’m hoping they’re not going to be as expensive as CNCDepot and Stepcraft. We’ll see.
I’ve just looked at some videos of how tool changing works on a spindle - https://youtu.be/lgib-txdUvY?t=162 - and it looks like it’s the same mechanism as on the Makita Router where you use 2 tools to tighten or loosen the nut. Changing tools that way is kind of cumbersome. I know of the Mafell spindle, but that seems like a solution that’s kind of hacked together and you don’t get the automatic speed change. Is there any way to speed up tool change on a normal spindle?
Yeh, the pro mount is the same as our HD mounts for the 65mm spindles.
A 65mm spindle on the pro would not be an issue. With the larger spindles they do weigh more and can increase wear on lead screw hence why we recommend using the HDZ. It transfers power more efficiently meaning greater lifting force and less wear.
The Mechatron stuff is pretty nice. I would say I doubt you’d see any benefits of it over a spindle from China or similar.
I don’t believe CNCDepot sells a spindle compatible with a Shapeoko and nor does Stepcraft…
A 1.5kW Mechatron spindle kit is 1526 EUR from Mechatron, with German VAT.
Support and quality control are the winning points for me:
It is much more expensive than a China spindle though.
Yes costs being equal or comparative I’d buy the Mechatron but it’s almost 15 x the cost of a stand alone spindle. At that point China made are disposable in comparison. If it breaks you can have a new one on standby and have enough left over to buy a old car.
The runout on all the spindles I’ve had has been very low - and for projects that need a high precision 0.1 is easily achievable with a compact router… 0.05 is harder to get to but that’s another kettle of fish, really runout on a imported spindle is not likely to be an issue.
Thanks for the link. The link you’ve sent is an 80mm spindle though and I need a 65mm one. Mechatronic does have a 1.5kw 65mm water-cooled spindle on their website, but it doesn’t seem like Sorotec has it as a standard.
What’s the big difference between an 800w and a 1.5kw spindle? Are you just getting more torque for the extra money you’re paying?
Looking at this thread made me drift into looking at spindles and VFDs, and I was quite surprised how inexpensive they can be, for example this one is less than £180, although I appreciate you’d h ave to buy a pump, the tank and lengths of hose.
It’s not something I’d consider doing for a little while, as I’m already over budget, but definitely something for the future.
The only thing I would have reservations about is the feeding of cooling pipes and power/control cables, after the hassle I had with dust extraction hoses and power to the router. Is this something fairly easily resolved?
A HFS-6515 is 699 EUR including 19% German VAT, so 587 EUR excluding it. A similar G-penny spindle is 76 EUR, so the difference is 8x, not 15x.
It’s very expensive but not that expensive.
Mechatron spindles are specced to <5µm runout as standard. Mine is specced to <2µm.
Ah, sorry, didn’t notice. Mechatron sells the 65mm spindle for 20EUR more than the 80mm spindle. FWIW, the quote I got from Mechatron was very similar to the cost of the kit from Sorotec, so I expect ~1500 EUR to be the ballpark you’re looking at.
Also I forgot, one thing you might want to do is handle the water cooling yourself. Mechatron sold me some scary looking (and loud looking) mains voltage AC cooling fans for their radiator. That was too much for me so I replaced them with DC cooling fans like you’d use on a PC case. Much less scary.
0.8kW, 1.5kW. Yes, the 1.5kW spindle has about double the torque.
Can you take a picture of your setup and post it? When I look at the spindle kit (Sorotec Online-Shop - Mechatron,China,Elte Spindel,Suhner Frässpindel,Isel) I only see the mount, the VFD and the spindle. I’d love to see whatever else that comes along.
If their water cooling is not that good, would it be better to buy a spindle (mechatron Katalog - Onlineshop - HF-Spindeln, Frequenzumrichter und Komplettsysteme fuer CNC) and a VFD from them and then figure out the cooling system myself?
There are some photos here. The pack I got from Mechatron had:
It’s not that it’s bad, it was just scary for me, it was my first time dealing with mains voltage electricity and I could handle it for the VFD, where it was basically unavoidable, but I didn’t want to touch it for some measly fans.
I used everything they sent me, except for the fans.
That said, you absolutely could build a loop yourself.
I found the pipes and cable pretty easy to manage, but I chose mount everything from the top of the enclosure.
There’s not too much to manage coming from the spindle. I think common wisdom is to ensure the spindle power cable doesn’t go in any of the drag chains.
The coolant solution can be pretty simple, really:
I’ve never run the Shapeoko without the spindle since I found the router too loud so I can’t really comment on performance differences. I was trying to replicate my Nomad, but biggerer.
Not that I know of, but one mitigation is to buy spare collet nuts (and collets), one per tool you are going to use in a specific multi-tool job, and prepare the nut+collet+endmill assemblies in advance. This way, tool change boils down to loosening the nut, swapping the nut+collet+endmill for the next one, re-fasten, done. Honestly, if this is too cumbersome/long for you, you will probably find yourself looking at ATCs (and that’s a whole 'nother can of worms…but there are some pretty impressive threads here on folks who did just that, for lots of monies)
Water-cooling: it’s not that big a deal to install really. Like everyone else I started with a bucket of coolant with a lid and two holes in it,
and to be honest it worked perfectly, but the cheapo submersible pump that came with the spindle kit started to agonize so I decided to go the chiller way:
and it’s quite convenient too, so I would recommend it for a hassle-free experience.
There are a variety of alternatives that offer a quicker toolchange:
Routers:
Spindles:
I’d say the Teknomotor QTC spindle is probably the most realistic of these but it’ll require some work to mount it to a Shapeoko, it won’t work out of the box like a 65mm spindle.
That was a lot of great answers 
.
Right now I’m definitely leaning towards the Mechatron spindle set, even though it’s more expensive than a Chinese version. If I want to upgrade in the future, there’s also the Mechatron ATC Adapter (Sorotec Online-Shop - Tool change adapters) like @Moded1952 points out. That looks super interesting, but it’s going to take some tweaking to get that to work of course.
I just heard back from Mechatron. They gave me a quote of 2500euro for the 65mm 1.5kw water-cooled spindle, which seems to be a good deal more than the 800w 65mm spindle or the 80mm 2.2kw spindle for that matter: Sorotec Online-Shop - Tools. I’m not sure what the reason for the price bump is, but I’ve asked them now.
Look at the detailed quote. When they first quoted me, they included a bunch of stuff I didn’t want, like a set of collets and a chiller unit instead of a radiator + fan. You can just ask them to remove the stuff you don’t need.
