I shot an email to support but it was late Friday night and I’m impatient to wait for Monday business.
I have a Nomad 3 from 2/2023, not many hours (spent almost a year in storage), and appear to have burned up the spindle motor controller.
Anyone have an idea on best path to a solution?
The details - cutting some tricky material (laminated fiberglass/ elastomer) and stalled the motor for ~1/2 second, hit “Stop”, upon resuming the program would run, but the spindle won’t even attempt to turn. Belts are good, everything seems to turn by hand fine, but I’m guessing an electrical failure on the controller board?
I feel like I need to add a fuse once I get this thing back together. It’s way too easy to stall the spindle, especially if the material is a bit springy.
So Support was able to sell me a new board, and I wrote it up to a lesson learned. Don’t do stringy materials.
I got the new board in on Tuesday, and got the machine running again. Finished the fatal project, then did some acrylic keychains for the kids.
Today, I fired it up in some bois d’arc, a nice hard wood. Everything was great for the first 20 minutes, until I ran a finishing contour and both flutes hit on a tight corner. Hit the “stop” within ~ 1 sec (a dongle button would be a great upgrade so I’m not messing with a computer mouse) but looks like the spindle burned out again.
Do I need to start cutting power with the physical button on the front of the machine, instead of the “Stop” button in CM?
Is there a board/ mod with overload protection? This is gonna get expensive, fast, if I try to do anything resembling efficient feedrates. Edit: pretty happy to find out it’s under warranty (yay Carbide 3D!); I’ll still want to figure out how to protect the board better in the future.
I just had a similar experience with a 2 day old Nomad. Only managed to run the starter project before the spindle gave way.
Is the issue simply the spindle overloading the board when it stalls? I’m not sure what’s fried in mine, the spindle itself or the spindle control board.
Edit: Looks like you started a new thread on this and they’re taking care of you (which is why I felt comfortable spending $$$ on a Nomad instead of $$ on a random Chinese unit).
I strongly recommend doing a spindle warmup - even pausing or cancelling it a couple times at low speed before letting it run all the way through - before loading it up. Grease is a fluid, and can shake out of place during transit (liquefaction, basically), so “stirring” it together is wise to avoid overheating the spindle on your first run.
