I’m almost willing to bet this is a me problem and not a them problem but man…
I’ve had my Shapeoko 4 XXL up and running for right at 1.5 years. In that time its run for probably 25 hours every other week or so. 99% of the time its eating mdf but always wood. I run 1500mm, 4mm stepdown, 3mm stepover with smooth lead-ins at about 18k rpm on average.
I killed my 4th Carbide Compact Router tonight. I ordered a Makita one this time because I’m in a bind and they’ll deliver tomorrow to get me up and running again. What am I doing wrong?
I think it’s just the nature of the beast. There probably could be improvements but would probably be such a costly endeavor for the company that it’s just not worth trying. Especially so if you don’t have your own engineering firm in house.
edit: You could look into modifying it to be a roller bearing but even shielded ball bearings are going to wear in a reasonable amount of time at 25 hours per week.
Right, no in house engineering firm around here.
I actually kind of misspoke, I meant 25 hours in a week and then it might sit unused for a month. Wish there was a way to track hours.
ok so my perception of time is, and always has been woefully inaccurate lol.
I started running my machine on 7-4-2023 I have logged 160.9 hours in almost 16 months. I’ve killed 4 carbide routers in 161 hours of run time, surely this is not within acceptable parameters?
I still say I’m doing something wrong somewhere.
Usually it’s dust getting into the bearings, in some instances it’s been a lack of lubrication from the factory, some folks may be over-tightening to the point of deforming the housing, but I’ve torqued down on mine to the point of the tools beginning to bend and they’ve been fine.
They have a 12 month warranty — if they fail during that timeframe (or even close to it), let us know at support and we’ll work out how to handle it.
OK fantastic! I know I have 1 for sure that would be within that time frame potentially 2, I’ll look into it and contact support.
I keep my machine pretty clean, little dust in the air due to great dust collection and I remade my lower half of boot with a longer brush. I blow my machine off before each new part I run. I’m assuming there’s no way for me to lube the routers at all?
To be clear running 1500mm/m, 4mm stepdown, 3mm stepover, and 18k rpm, (#3 on router), would be considered within spec of what I should be running these at? No benefit to running router faster or slower than that in MDF?
When we see repeated router failure from the same person, it tends to be too much clamping pressure. When you install the router, clamp with only enough pressure to hold it in place; don’t crank it down “just to be safe.”
Consider what you are using, a Palm Router. They are very useful, but not particularly made for continuous long run times. Typically a palm router is used a few minutes or less at a time. To get reliable use in your cnc, I would very much suggest switching out to a water cooled 4-bearing spindle.
Likely a combination of the above. Too tight in clamp, dust and just a bad router useage. As @MindlessCorpse stated trim routers typically run for a few minutes and get put down when using as a trim router. The C3D router is a clone of the Makita and the Makita is alright as a trim router but not really useful as a CNC router and then the C3D is a clone of the Makita. Sounds like you would be better with a spindle. Now that you have gone through 4 routers you have already paid for a spindle. So move up. The C3D spindles have had a few problems but C3D always seems to fix them. Any mechanical/electrical device has a Mean Time between Failure. That is an average and some items fail immediately and some never fail. It is always a numbers game about failure but the C3D spindles seem to have good reliability according to people here on the forum.
Will -
Is this running time for the machine or the spindle/router? If not for the spindle/router, it might be a good adder for the next rev of machine software.
I had the same issue. I’ve been through 3 carbide routers and ended up getting a makita instead. The run time differences on my carbide routers all varied too. One lasted 6 months, 2nd one lasted 3 weeks, and the 3rd lasted around 5 months. That bottom bearing always smoked on all 3 for me. I presume dust got into 2 of them but the one that was short lived probably had a bad bearing from the start.
My refurbished Makita has been going strong for the last 4 months and still feels smooth. I cut a variety of materials, hardwood, softwoods, mdf, acrylic, and carbon fiber. Probably put between 4-10 hours of runtime per week on my machine.
I have had to replace my C3D router two times as well, also put new bearing in, I do a lot of MDF and i fine the dust in the bearings. I sometime think maybe the dust collection is too strong and pulls it up into the bearings. I have also gone to a Makita router we will see how that goes. Also, I am going to order the bearings Mike Smith suggested.
You are finding dust in the bearings but the router has a fan that pushes air down and the dust collection would pull it away. So likely it is just a bad design. The C3D is a clone of the Makita and the Makita routers also have their bearing (bottom) fail. So it is likely something in the design on Makita that was copied by the clone.
