Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Spindle Upgrade Project

The spindle that came with the cnc I just got is small, good enough to cut even a 12mm thick acrylic which is awesome because laser cutters requires 100w to cut acrylic this thick. But for me it is not powerful enough because I am planning to use the cnc as production machine for my air purifiers si I need to upgrade it and I found a suitable dremel class hand tool which can be bought cheaply at local hardware.

It is perfect since the tip of the hand tool is threaded so that means I can create a custom bracket having the same diameter as the original spindle and I will attach it to the cnc with no problem.

So I had to buy aluminum block (50mmx50mmx50mm) and off I go to my favorite machine shop to have it done perfectly. And with a few discussions with the machinist, he was able to execute the task perfectly and here is the result:

but when I tried to tighten the clamp to its maximum, the spindle still moves but I don't blame the machinist since I was the one who said the diameter should 45mm, but I was able to solve easily by wrapping the bracket with scatch tape and the problem was solved:
SO I test it further while moving the z-axis upwards, it wont go up to 30mm because the custom bracket was too thick it acts as a barrier so, tomorrow I will go back to have it fixed, it was still my fault, hehe here is the problem area:
Another problem I encountered is that as the rotation speed reaches 12000 rpm, the attached endmill begins to wiggle so I still need to fix it: