My new water cooled spindle solution

[Croy9000 (Steve Easley)]

Finished up my spindle cooling enclosure today and thought I would share. I used a PC cooling solution.

The pump is controlled by the VFD, which I am programming to turn on when the spindle is running. Here are the components of the setup for anyone interested

• Reservoir/Pump (Thermaltake PR11 CL-W078-PL00BL-A)
• 120mm Case Fan (Rosewill)
• Radiator (BXQINLENX B01D824T8A)
• Flow Indicator (Fosa)
• 1/4" Vinyl Tubing
• G1/4 Thread Barb Connectors ( Aramox B07GS538RD)
• Coolant (Koolance LIQ-702BU-B)
• Enclosure (BUD Industries NBF-32414)

For details on the electronics enclosure see my other thread here: My new electronics enclosure

[DanStory (Daniel Story)]

Very nice and clean!

Probably unnecessary due to size/mass of the spindle (compared to a car engine), but to help prevent thermal lag have the pump delay shutoff (continue cooling) when the spindle is turned off?

[Croy9000 (Steve Easley)]

Yeah I definitely need to spend more time on that (pump power). I spent all day trying to get my VFD to not immediately energize the FA/FC relay on power up (and stay there). I played with a few of the PD52 modes, but mode 01 (Run) just immediately energized the relay. Finally had a picard facepalm moment realizing I have FOR strapped to DCM, telling the VFD its always in run mode. Doh! Made total sense.

I could potentially get around this by using the CM D13 pin (Spindle Enable), tying it to the VFD FOR pin, but could not get the pin to do anything. Pretty sure after looking through the default grbl config.h that D13 is not enabled by default (here). So would have to play with a custom compile, something I want to play with soon, just not now.

So atm I just have the pump tied to the 12v supply.

[DanStory (Daniel Story)]

Yeah, when I had the grbl controller, I had to recompile it to enable that pin too and also to fine tune the PWM (https://github.com/gnea/grbl/blob/b75e5571eeaeb22a88304716fb1e7411f9c28be0/grbl/config.h#L589).
It really wasn’t that hard, you just use the Arduino IDE (https://github.com/gnea/grbl/wiki/Compiling-Grbl#via-the-arduino-ide-all-platforms-recommended-for-all-users)