Nomad 3 motor losing power?

Recently my new-ish Nomad 3 has been doing this weird revving thing. The motor will slow down…then speed up…then slow down. It usually happens on a long job, after the motor has gotten a bit hot. Not to hot to touch…but still pretty warm.

In the video linked below I am engraving a very shallow image, not hard on the machine/cutter at all…so it’s not like the motor is struggling to keep up.

Any idea what’s going on?

First check I would do is brushes.

What brushes? Inside the motor?

Similar thing happened to my machine. Ultimately, it turned out that the spindle bearings went bad, and that was eating up my motor power, especially at high RPMs (like engraving). I replaced the spindle (customer support sent me a new one), and everything was good as new. And for reference, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that the bearings were shot (turning the bit by hand felt fine, nothing felt like it was binding per se, just a little bit crunchy).

Yes. Unless it is a spindle, then I am wrong again

Oh man I hope that is not the issue…this is actually a new spindle I just installed like 2 days ago! My Fourth spindle replacement actually…bearings going bad on all of them. I think the issue is the nut on top of the spindle. If it’s too tight, the spindle has to work harder/and gets hotter. Too loose and you get wobble in your cutter. It’s a VERY fine line. This new spindle has what looks like red loctite globbed on top of the nut I assume to keep it in position. But maybe it’s too tight and causing power issues with the spindle.

Adam
I don’t have a spindle. When I have used equipment that has one, there is a warm-up period and a new spindle has a break-in period where it runs with no load for a given amount of time. The maintenance techs took care of that. Does yours suggest that?

Edit:
The red on top is probably a tamper mark to see if it has been changed. Maybe, probably, could be.

I think the nomad uses a brushless motor if that’s what you were getting at.

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That’s correct, no brushes in the Nomad.

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