Can leaving the spindle on over night, mess up the spindle?
The spindle is run by a VFD. Some people leave their VFD powered on all the time with no troubles. However VFD’s are susceptible to lightning strikes and are expensive to replace. My Jet lathe has a VFD and I unplug it when I am not using it. A friend has a Grizzly 24" lathe with a VFD and he leaves it on continuously.
So as Clint Eastwood asked in Dirty Harry “Do you feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”. Personally I would power it off when not in use.
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Shutting off the spindle will not effect the homing/initialization, so you can turn it back on as needed.
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I just overthought it and built a 2 pole light switch box for my 220V spindle and flip the switch since the plug was not easy to get to and I didn’t want to keep plugging and unplugging an extension cord repeatedly. I designed the box and printed it. It is 4" x 6" x 3" high. It was easier to design and print it than I thought it would be to lay out all of the holes for the plugs and switches and whatnot. Besides, where’s the fun of having a 3D printer if you don’t over use it!? I used a 220V 20A IEC C-20 panel mount plug for the input power, put a fuse on each hot, and used a NEMA 6-20R to plug in my VFD.
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