Nothing to really show right now. I have been working on my spindle. I picked up an ER11 collet holder and set of collets that took a while to get here from Hong Kong. The holder I bought has an 8mm shaft. The plan is to use 608 bearings (skate bearings) for the spindle. As shipped, it would have been a press fit for the bearings but I want to be able to replace them easily. So, I chucked it up in the lathe and spend some quality time with some emery paper to bring the shaft down for a slip fit for the bearings. Well, it took quite a while with that hardened shaft.
While I was doing that, I also finished adjusting my cam lock for my tailstock on my lathe.
I really like it but it was a pain to get set up. The installation was dead simple. Drill one hole in the web on the side of the tailstock and put it together. The pain was figuring out the orientation for the interior nut so that the threads line up where the quarter turn will pull the bolt tight. If you turn it one way, the thread is 1/2 turn off so it won't tighten quite enough to lock. Being a slow learner at times, the real solution was to use my center punch to mark one side of the nut so I could see when it was rotated 180 degrees. It would have been much simpler if I had done that from the beginning.
I did make a test run for the motor for the spindle. I have a 350 watt brushless motor:
and a brushless motor contoller:
I started up the motor and ramped up the speed part way using an arduino. I am going to look later at controlling the spindle with my grblshield stepper shield but I have been waiting for the developer of grbl (a g-code interpreter for arduino) to get back to development so I can ask him a few questions regarding the spindle and limit switch controls. For now I am just running it with a different arduino.
The general idea for the spindle is like this:
But I am not really sure on the component placement yet. I think it will be shrouded with a place to hold the speed controller and also maybe a fan for cooling. I don't know how hot the motor will run under load and at speed.
