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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a 65mm 800w water cooled spindle from Gpenny that I bought on aliexpress. It is miles better than the router I had. It is pretty heavy compared to the router so I would not go any bigger without getting an HDZ. It came with a pump, tubing, VFD and wire connector. It was not difficult to setup based on all the information available here. I spent about $600 on the whole kit. I don’t need more than 800w on my standard SO3 because I run out of rigidity before spindle power. I would not be afraid of getting a kit from aliexpress (specifically from GPenny Machine). Mechatron will be nicer but I don’t know if the cost will be worth it.
Unlike those inexpensive Chinese HF spindles, they also have realistic power specs/claims. Like routers, most of those Chinese spindles seem to be improperly rated on input rather than output power. The exception seems to be G-Penny’s, provided the product of their power factors and efficiencies happens to be 57.7% (identical to the correction factor for 3 phase motor input VA).
Indeed, the only upsides I see of the 2.2kW spindle are the big ER20 collet which lets me run standard 10mm edge finders, 10mm, 12mm and 1/2" end mills where I need to and the low speed torque that lets me use spot and regular drills in it at < 5,000 RPM for CNC drilling cycles.
I suspect the 800W or the 1.5kW can also drill at low speed, I’ve never found the stall torque of my 2.2kW Chinese spindle, even when sending it into a 2,000mm / min cut set up for 24,000RPM having fogotten to change speed from 1,000RPM edge finder speed , it just made really big chips. Suffice to say, the machine is the limiting factor, not the spindle grunt.
I wouldn’t go back to an air cooled screamer though for all the ear defenders in England, being able to hear yourself think is worth a lot to me, hours of the AMB Kress air cooled scream drove me nuts.
The adaptor doesn’t seem too expensive and then I guess you’d need a compressor of some sort, so if it’s technically feasible, then it wouldn’t break the bank I guess.
I don’t want to discourage you but putting an ATC on a shapeoko is not a small undertaking. You will realistically need to swap your controller out and program a new one. I have done this on a larger machine (AVID CNC using the CNCDepot kit) and I would not recommend doing it on a shapeoko unless it is for fun. If you are trying to get up and running with making money on your machine, I would look at an 800w or 1.5kw standard spindle. ATC is way cool but not practical on a machine of this class. The existing controller lacks the software framework and IO to properly implement ATC and the added weight would require the HDZ in my opinion. If you are looking for a challenging and fun project, go for it. Be sure to post pictures and show us your progress if you do.
I have/had one of those adapters and don’t rate it but mainly as I tore it down to look inside . I think all Stepcraft run a UCCNC controller wrapped in a custom GUI. Unless you are familiar with cnc setup I’d say UCCNC is a allot of hardword and I don’t feel there is allot of documentation or support.
I’d also agree with @nwallace points on ATC units. I’ve fitted a fair few and it’s a pain in the ass, the easiest option is a masso as it’s all ‘pre configured’ but you’d want the masso touch unless you have a screen etc to hand. That’s close to 1k + the ATC, air solenoids, compressor, pipe, wire and all the rest. You could be well into the 3k mark before the machine and potentially weeks of work. For the price they made some interesting design compromises and functionally for the money there are core bits missing like look ahead and increase feeds and speeds, but it is well supported.
I love a gadget and ATC’s now come under that mentality. It’s super cool but unless your in a production environment it’s almost impossible for me to argue a good case for them. A bitsetter is the next best thing. I think a tool change takes around 30-1min. Unless you are going to do allot of tool changes or money is no object there isn’t allot of point.
.
. I think all Stepcraft run a UCCNC controller wrapped in a custom GUI. Unless you are familiar with cnc setup I’d say UCCNC is a allot of hardword and I don’t feel there is allot of documentation or support.