This is a bi-yearly thread for me at this point… It’s getting old.
I get a replacement spindle, it sounds great. I baby it in fear, barely dare to use it, I do one 3 hour wood project, it ends in ruined bearings. Almost without fail.
I am well out of warranty and really tired of this happening.
If the spindle is non user serviceable as it says on it. What is there to do wrong?
An example of a previously ruined spindle. The bearing is seemingly seized and the shaft is rubbing causing heat and even more wear.
There have been a couple of customers who have sourced their own bearings as well as an arbor press to put things together — that might be an option for you — naturally if you want to arrange for your spindle to be rebuilt, let us know at support@carbide3d.com
It might be that we can work out our sending you a new unit (so that you can get back to working sooner) and you can then send your current unit in for a rebuild, then further down the road when your rebuilt unit has to be swapped in, you can send the other to us for a rebuild and we can thus minimize your down-time.
I will probably try to rebuild and source my own bearings when it fails completely.
Now that i have a lathe i may even make my own spindle block.
I would really just like to know what i could have done wrong.
Maybe I am really just asking for tips and tricks to maintain the machine and use it properly.
Keeping mostly with the feeds and speeds recommended the only thing i can think of is stickout and runtime for possible overload scenarios.
The bearings should last longer than that — the feeds and speeds as noted in MeshCAM and Carbide Create should work well — let us know about this at support@carbide3d.com and we will work out how to handle this.
I am on my 3rd set of bearings, all of them were quite low run time so I think there is something going on which isn’t fully understood. To be fair support did really well for me and I had little to no downtime.
They also asked about he type of material I have been cutting and whether I had dust collection so I think they are collecting info more widely to understand what is going on.
One question they didn’t ask was the type of cutters typically used.
What strikes me is the bearing manufacturer is pretty much unique in providing angular contact bearings in this form factor for this rpm. It makes me wonder if other manufacturers don’t think they can make something to this spec.
I had also considered making a custom spindle block to house angular contact bearings of a size and spec which is more widely available. That was until I saw the recent success which @jessicat has had with a full spindle.
Yeah support has been very helpful. I am on the 6th spindle that they sent quickly.
One of the spindles they sent I still have as a spare since they sent it without the alignment pins by mistake. I had to salvage these from another.
This spindle has deep groove ball bearing instead of the angular contact bearings that have had a tendency to fail. So far so good with that one. But I think the bearings are not meant for high speeds at all. Very Viscous feeling.
My first replacement had bearing seats that where so loose that the outer part of the bearing spun against the block after it seized.
Most of my cutting is aluminium with single flute cutters. I use low DOC and high stepover.
Dust cannot be the issue because when I cut wood or MDF I use extraction which seems to keep everything clean. When cutting aluminium I get nice chips and no dust.
That leaves:
Uneven radial forces during each rotation due to single flute cutter.
Heat build up in bearing and spindle block (it does get warm but not too hot to touch)
Bearing manufacturer with unrealistic specs.
Personally, it feels like the last or possibly the first of these 3.
I notice a lot of heat. I saw smoke the first time it broke down.
Might be unrealistic specs for the somewhat heavy use and heat.
My plan was to watercool the spindle before it failed again haha .
Usually it gets the issues on longer jobs running on wood. I don’t go very deep, but i keep a good tempo. Using just the chip fan for “extraction”.
I use single flutes and try to keep my stickout as short as possible. Material thickness at most (unless i want to dodge some workholding)
Dissecting the bearings i find a whole bunch of different debris. so that seems to be the problem with the stock ones. I found acrylic and metal chips.
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