There’s a lot of differerent approaches on the cooling loop, from PC coolers mounted on the Z to buckets under the table (I have an old RV water container under the table).
Info that might be useful;
- The fountain pump in the kits is about the last thing I would spec for the head and flow rate through the spindle, the only thing those specs have in common with the application is “water”
- If you want your own pump, a low voltage solar heating circulator or similar works well, you’re looking for 2-5 litres per min flow at about 5 metres head if you run the PU tubing along the drag chains to your spindle
- The PU tubing is the major flow constraint, there’s ways to run bigger tubing up to the spindle and adapt down to the tiny 6mm bore adapters on the spindle, but they’re not necessary, the cooling load isn’t enough to worry about this
- The CW3000 “chiller” and it’s eBay / Amazon clones make a really nice integrated, tidy solution, there’s loads of threads about making it’s fan less noisy (so you can hear the horrid HuanYang VFD fan), lots of users of it here to comment
- You don’t want just water in the coolant loop, some anti-corrosion additive is highly recommended, I use anti-freeze and RO (de-ionised) water because I have it available
More generally
You’ll need to upgrade the drag chains or, IMO, preferably, install a couple of new drag chains for the spindle wiring & plumbing. The VFD and spindle wiring give off massive amounts of electrical noise and can put you in controller disconnect purgatory;
I used an EMI filter on the input to the VFD, screened motor wire and ran the spindle motor cable up the other side of the machine and along it’s own drag chains to keep it away from the Shapeoko stepper motor and signalling cabling. That also meant no messing with the factory wiring or drag chains. More discussion in the thread below;