I had the 500w spindle. It was nice and quiet, but I managed to burn mine up. I was having other issues with my MPCNC that I was ironing out that may have helped cause the spindle’s demise. I was having a hard time running the machine fast enough to make chips. Since I wasn’t making chips, the bit was getting hot. The heat from the bit dissipates into the body of the spindle and the little cooling fan on top couldn’t keep the spindle cool. It looks like it ended up toasting a bearing and locking up the spindle.
As a comparison, the highly popular Dewalt spindle is 660 Watts.
Then I think i’ll go for the 500W motor. Is there a significant difference between a DC motor and a brushless motor? I heard something about the brushless having the same power no matter the RPM and the DC version having less power the faster it goes.
12000RPM isn’t too slow. The problem with spindles on the market is that they’re pretty gut-less and are prone to what I’ll call slow burning. When an electric motor slows down, dropping from its nominal RPM due to load, it’s bad news; there is less “back EMF” and the motor draws a lot more current… this is what causes motors to overheat and armatures to burn their insulative coatings away.
You will notice however that most routers tend to be very gutsy, but they need to run at around 20’000 RPM – hence they tend to burn your bits when you run them at low feed rates. Rubbing instead of cutting and chipping.
Ideally, you would like to have a low-speed spindle with plenty of torque. That way, you don’t burn your bits, dulling the blades with high friction rubbing. And you don’t have the motor slowing and burning. But has anyone found a cheap, low RPM spindle with enough guts to chomp through material without rubbing and burning bits or slowing and burning armature?
Depending on what you consider “cheap” maybe something like a 611 with an aftermarket PID to keep it low would work. Also the 800w - 1200W chinese spindles tend to be actual spindles with a VFD, and probably end up in the range of a 611 and PID.
The Makita RT router goes as low as 10k and stays there under load. You can also get it as the Carbide compact router. It’s slightly less powerful than the 611. I think that’s as much power as you can fit in that size. There’s a few tests by Winston Moy comparing the two, and the makita holds up well. I use it for aluminum because it spins at 10k.