Welcome to unsupported upgrades! Development of this spindle cartridge definitely took longer than expected due to adding another kid to the clan, pretty crazy times at the office…and a global health pandemic. I ended up doing a total of three revisions of the preloaded dual angular contact spindle design I am currently running on my Nomad 883 Pro before I was happy with it. This spindle design has a larger diameter spindle shaft and bearings than stock machine as well as frictionless dual labyrinth seals. The three I’ve built up so far have been super smooth but also very stiff, quite happy with this ‘best and final’ design. This is a direct stock spindle replacement, 100% bolt on with no change of clearances and takes less than 15 minutes with basic tools.
10mm diameter spindle shaft up from 8mm on stock design, should be ~56% stiffness improvement if I can do math correctly on Saturday mornings
7000 sized angular contact bearings
Six custom machined parts per spindle; housing, spindle shaft, two inner and two outer labyrinth seals
I’m offering these at $300 each shipped and a handful have already sold to people who have offered to do product reviews if you’re on the fence. I anticipate people being pretty stoked with the improvement in material removal rates but mostly the reduction in sound levels cutting harder materials.
Woo, finally! If you’d asked me a few weeks ago I’d probably have bought one but I’ve already sunk nearly a Nomad worth of money into upgrading my Nomad spindle a bit more drastically.
For anyone who hasn’t had the need to do it, he’s not making this up, it actually takes ~5 minutes to remove and reinstall the stock cartridge, it’s super easy.
@TonyDangerCoiro (or anyone who already has one of these), I’m curious if you can try low WOC, high DOC cuts before and after installing the new spindle cartridge. I tried with the stock cartridge but had no luck and concluded that the answer was to replace the Z-axis entirely (and probably the X and Y axes after it) so I’d be interested to hear if this makes a large difference.
I’d also be interested to know how this works. Is it the ability to push the machine harder without chatter? Any numbers?
Almost half of this first run is sold already which is somewhat astounding.
My overall conclusion is the Nomad 883 Pro is built like a tank and the Nomad 3 should be even better. Rails and carriages are quite stout for the cutting loads, my experience is it’s just spindle that gets loud in harder materials. On material removal rates, this spindle cartridge is the “final” version of what I started building/documenting back on this thread with numbers on this comment and the next one:
Interesting, mine was that the Nomad 883 Pro is built like jelly… I’ve tried to push the machine to its absolute limits while measuring power consumption and it becomes a chattery mess long before it maxes its 75W spindle power. I went and measured the flex in various components and there’s a lot. You can follow my whole journey and see the numbers in this thread.
To be fair to the machine, the structural components look good, the flex seems to be in the linear motion system, particularly the anti-backlash nuts but also a bit in the linear guides. @Vince.Fab was able to do amazing things with a ballscrew upgrade.
Did you ever do it with the stock motor and upgraded cartridge? It looks like you’re cutting at 12kRPM so I guess not?
The .04" WOC, .04" DOC. 40ipm cut you mention was ~1.05 cubic centimetres per minute but if you take away the 20% MRR boost from your 12kRPM spindle, you get 0.83.
My highest stablish MRR with stock was 2.7mm WOC, 1.5mm DOC, 250mm/min, 10kRPM, single flute, which is 1.01 cubic centimetres per minute but I was always a hair away from becoming a chattery mess cutting like that.
I’ll be curious to see more cuts but even just the improved noise is a nice upgrade.
