one Dead DW660, looking into spindles for cutting plywood

#1

We haven’t even finished setting up the machine properly, we were cutting up some baffles for some speakers we’re building. We have had some weird occurrences where the machine goes off in a random direction, cutting pretty deep and fast in turn putting a lot of strain on the Dewalt, it’s as if the Gcode got corrupt or something, very weird, seems to happen after pause/resuming although I haven’t confirmed if that’s just a coincidence or not.

The dewalt just started bogging weirdly and completely died while cutting about 4-5mm depth into baltic birch. It was the 4th baffle being cut, I’m not sure if it’s a defect or we’ll just probably keep burning through them if we use them for this heavy cutting… Also would like something that will be able to cut through 1/2 baltic birch in less than 4-5 passes…

Looking at those 1.5kw water cooled chinese spindles off ebay. Expensive, but overall if we want to be serious about cutting up speaker parts with a CNC it might be the first step. Maybe even 2.2kw since they have the ER20 collets? Decisions…

#2

Might want to ask them how much that spindle weighs. Also look into dust collection. It’s not helping the life of the router by sucking in all that dust in the air. It’s also bad for you.

#3

from what I gather the spindle is about 8-9lbs … that’s about 2.5x the DW660.

This one seems to be running a similar spindle, I guess not watercooled http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1396997

We’re still on the testing/development phase - dust collection will follow. Still I don’t think that’s what killed it after 30mins of runtime.

#4

Shorten the z length of you machine or at least move your work piece all the way up to the gantry, most routers are 1-3" looks like your at 5 or 6. Every half the length of the z is 2 times as rigid. The more rigid you keep the spindle the easier the cuts are on it. You have a really long z for a router. You feeds and speeds might be off or maybe you chose the wrong endmill, Are you using a router bit, what size endmill, how many flutes? I’m pretty sure you can mill that in 2 passes pretty easy if you have a very short Z. I did 1/4" plus a little into the MDF spoil board in 1 pass. very easily.

#5

2 passes sounds awesome…

This is my current endmill - it was overheating a bit so I upped the feedrate and it seemed to be better, will get the dewalt fixed and tinker some more. Definitely will shorten the Z.

#6

You might want to try an 1/8" end mill for a while, it puts less torque on the machine. The larger the bit the more perfect your setting need to be.