Last week i received my Nomad after waiting about 80 days for it.
I am pleased and happy about its performance and capabilities so far. Nothing really to compare it to being new to owning a cnc.
I noticed it right away but thought nothing of it at first, but i now notice the spindle being quite loose…
This causing the end mill to get caught and dragging on walls during contouring snapping endmills…
See video for the extent of the issue.
are there steps I can do to improve this? it is as much as a millimeter in each direction X/Y and half a millimeter in Z.
The linear rails and the other two axis are rock solid on their bearings.
I will not say solved.
But being concerned that i will have to replace something i checked the usual.
The nut on top is quite loose and did not require much force to loosen. I then loosened the set screws on the pulley. partially pulling the spindle out, inspecting the area, pushing firmly, but not forcefully together.
hand tightening the nut on top , re-tightening the set screws.
Some, or most of the play in the Z is gone, it is a lot more quiet as well. X/Y still has play.
Have not checked runout, but at least some of the movement is gone.
ok so I just took the spindle apart…cleaned it up a bit…and reassembled. The z wiggle is now gone. I think the issue was that the top bearing somehow became loose…or maybe just got bumped upwards over time creating the slight z wiggle. After tightening everything back up it’s much better.
However…there is still some XY wiggle. maybe like .1 - .2mm wiggle. You can feel it when grabbing the spindle and moving it…and you can also hear it wiggle.
I tried cleaning and reassembling as well, but nothing improved.
The bottom bearing spins almost freely on the outer face, very loose. Especially when cutting.
I have asked for measures to take to prevent this in the future. Workarounds.
I really do not want a new spindle weekly…
They sent me a new one. It should arrive today.
But I am a bit scared it will happen again…
Support is west coast based for the most part, so it’s possible they are not online quite yet. I imagine you’ll get something in an hour or two.
Sorry this happened. These machines are super great when everything works, and support is really great at getting things resolved, it can just take them a bit (they’re supporting 3 new machines and 2 to 3 older machines now) to reply sometimes.
Edit: I know that’s little comfort at this time, but you should be taken care of pretty soon hopefully.
I hope that those above are the minority but just to say that despite taking some fairly large chunks out of aluminium in the last month or so since getting my N3 (including some noob mistakes leading to some fairly serious Z miscalculations, aka crashes) I’ve just checked my spindle and it seems snug as a bug.
PS if someone in support wants to replace my 102Z which got chipped withing the first 5 days due to my bad (i.e. following the “early mistakes are on us”) then I’d be delighted.
All is good with the new spindle so far. I managed to get the pins in most of the way.
I feel no more Wiggle.
It gets quite hot, but might just be the motor sinking heat into the machine?
But after some happy moments…
One of the belts snap. Right on the seem.
I will contact Carbide 3D support again with this other issue.
But just so it is out there. Are these belts easy to get a hold of?
Can’t speak for the 3 but on the 883 Pro, it’s a pretty ordinary timing belt, 162-2GT. The belt should have a part number on it and you should get plenty of results from Google.
I am also waiting on a new spindle for the same issue you had. Supposed to be here Monday. In the mean time…after reassembling my original spindle and tightening all the screws…again today it has become loud (rattle noise) and wiggles in the z axis again. I just removed it and it seems like this top nut at the very top of the spindle is easy to turn. I really tightened it down last time…and it’s very easy to undo now…so I am suspecting that this nut is problem. Trying to loctite on it tonight…not sure how long that will last.
My new spindle came with this nut 1mm from falling off. Not even hand tightened.
But i do not think there is much use in cranking down on this.
The bearings and the shim in between should be snug, not compressed.
After releasing the setscrews, just loosely hand tighten the top nut, tighten the setscrews and then tighten a bit harder to keep it in place. Maybe with loctite.
In the photo it looks like your set screws are loose. You tighten these firmly when the pulley is snug on the bearing?
The set screws in my picture were loosened just because I took it apart…but yes I did tighten them down before reinstalling.
So now after resally tightening down it sounded MUCH better (like when the machine came new) and no more wiggle at all…HOWEVER…the spindle gets VERY hot now. I think it may be too tight and it’s rubbing on the bearing…compressed like you said.
So there must be a fine line between tight and too tight.
