That’s right boys and girls, no more wimpy spindle to make me sad. This should have happened a LONG time ago!!!
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Question for Will…
Will I have to leave the stock motor connected to prevent errors of will the software allow it to run with the stock motor disconnected? I’m just going to adjust the speed of this spindle manually.
I do not know. The electronics mystify me. The person who might be able to answer that would be the previous person who tried upgrading the spindle on the Nomad:
Should work without it. There doesn’t appear to be any feedback to the main board from the spindle controller. You might want to unplug the spindle board from the main board just in case.
Keep in mind, I don’t work for Carbide, I don’t have schematics, and for all practical purposes this is just my best guess 
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Thanks for the feedback, guys.
I forget how electronics deal with power draw that is higher than what they are designed to do, but I my intuition suggests that either there will be a spike in power from the spindle trying to run that could fry the pcb on the Nomad, or it will be erratic in its performance. But I’d like to hear from others on the forum who know a lot more about these power draw issues or from Carbide 3D (except Mr. William, who has honorable recused himself 
).
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what is the rpm on that thing i have a 300w its 12k rpm
This spindle has its own power supply and speed is controlled via a potentiometer so it will not be electrically connected to the Nomad. This setup does have a way to control speed through Mach3 but I don’t know what the Nomad electronics use for the feedback loop so I’m just going to run it open loop. 10,000 rpm is fine for most work using 1/4" endmills and certainly not too fast for 1/8" or smaller end mills.
It runs at 10,200 rpm at 100VDC which is the peak output of the included power supply. This is the one I bought… Amazon.com. It says it runs at 12,000 rpm but I measured it at 10,200 rpm no load at peak voltage.
The stock spindle is a brushless motor with a hall sensor on it to detect phase, which provides the feedback for how fast it’s actually turning under load. That hall sensor feeds back to the driver on the spindle board. It’s not going to help at all with this spindle.
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If you listen to the Nomad spindle when it is cutting, it doesn’t maintain very good velocity control except under light loads. The fact that it is only 0.07 hp (about 50 Watts) means it just can’t do much.
A 500 W spindle (10x the power of the stock Nomad spindle) will barely change speed at the very small max load that the Nomad stock spindle can handle. But, it will allow cutting 5-10x faster in most materials. When cutting wood and plastics, slowing of the cutter by 10% or even more won’t make any difference. Not having closed loop velocity control isn’t optimum but its a great trade considering cutting speeds will increase 5-10x.
This spindle power supply has an input so that the speed can be controlled closed loop. A small magnet on the rotor and a hall sensor coupled with a cheap Arduino controller would offer closed loop velocity control with this system. In most cases I don’t think its needed.
I should be able to post a video of the dramatic difference in cutting power within the next few days.
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Should make a big difference, looking forward to seeing it!