I just installed my water cooled spindle. My basement is pretty chilly at 11C or 52F.
Do I need to warm the water to run the spindle?
No. It’s only on the opposite side of the spectrum would you need to cool it. The coolant will warm up naturally. My target temp is swimming pool temp (mid- high 80s) and i have an alarm off it gets to 95°
I would suggest warming the spindle up, then turning on the liquid coolant.
is 95 too high of a temp ?
I’ve seen 40 C as a recommended max coolant temperature for 2.2kw spindles. Not sure if that applies to all, but it at least gives a general range.
Your water intake setup (always cold/never freezing) sounds ideal for spindle operation.
imo yes… if it ain’t cool, it ain’t cooling
my room temp is a constant 32-34 so my chiller starts at roughly 28 when I power on and jump to a range between 32-34 its that ok in my case ?
I’m sure you’ll be fine, just for my own standards, i try to keep it in the 80s. There’s nothing published saying “this is the max your temp should be” and i kinda pulled 95 out of the sky… again if your coolant isn’t cool, it isn’t cooling… and the warmer your coolant temp is, the faster it’ll get even hotter due to the laws of thermodynamics…
I hope that makes sense.
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When I run my spindle, for hours, it feels just barely warm to the touch. When I hit it with a digital thermometer, it reads just a few degrees above room temperature. Maybe 26° or so. Ive often wondered… what’s the point of warming the spindle up at all? If I stop coolant flow, it will definitely heat up, 30°, 40° range.
If you are pumping 11° water through it, the outside of the spindle will probably be less than room temperature. Warming up your spindle, will in effect actually cool it down???
As I understand it, on industrial machines with ceramic bearings, the purpose of the warm up is to allow the bearings to expand a little and take up the “slop”. Im not sure if our pwn spindles have ceramic bearings, and I’m not sure how much “slop" is removed by running them at 26° vs 21° vs 30+° C. But I’ll admit it does seem a bit pointless at times, especially when I’m just waiting for the warmup to finish.
Knowing this, I still warm up my spindle each time. I haven’t changed my procedure just because I think there may be something I don’t understand.
If I were in your position, with 11°C coolant, I would try to install a thermostat system, that shuts the pump off below 25°C. I’ considering implementing the same system on my machine.
The purpose of the warm up is to warm the grease up. In the early days there were people complaining how loud the spindle was (when not cutting material).
During investigations they would just turn it on and run it up to 18k for hours like you would a router. Doing this wore the bearings out which is why it was loud. It’s recommended to not do the warm up with water running in the first place, and if not using it for an extended period running it longer than 15 min or 20 min. When i left the warehouse, they would run spindles at a low rpm for like 45 min to an hour… and there was half a dozen stations dedicated to it.
The old spindles used steel bearings but i believe the new spindles (within the past year and a half or so) use ceramic. Atc uses ceramic since day 1.
What Ill do is when I’m getting ready for the day, run and turn my spindle on at 6k rpm, then with the machine in park I’ll load material or work on my file. By the time im done it’s about ready to go into production mode.
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Are you aware of a recommended ideal temperature for the spindle to run?
There was a time when I would unplug the water pump for the warmup, but occasionally, I would forget to plug it back in, and start running a program. I then concluded that running a 20 minute warm up with coolant flowing was a safer approach.
Back when I did run the warm-up with the pump unplugged, it would get warm to the touch, maybe 30° C. Then minutes after starting a carve with coolant flowing, it would cool way down to 25°-ish. It really made me wonder what the point of the warmup is. I spend 20 minutes warming it up - then it cools back down within just a few minutes of cutting. The grease gets hot? then cold immediately after??
I always wondered if turning off the water cooler and running the spindle for warmup would shock bearings when you turned the cooling back on and all that cold water hit the now warmed up spindle.
I ended up wiring a variable rheostat that has an off to the fan in the cw3000 and running the spindle warm up, since the pump is still running it let it all come up to temp at the same time and only running the fan if needed
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So its like a car @Chris, you warm it up get all the tub flowing and system “primed” for operation and the chiller is literally the radiator to cool the engine/spindle from heat damage…in our case we have a passive chiller so it will always cool to ambient room temp give or take ± 2-3 degrees maybe more and stressfull log carves. So no need to warm up with chiller off just let it do it thing unless in extreme cold temp ? but basically let the machines do its thing right
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Like i said there is nothing published saying this is okay, this is not in regards to the temp. Now obviously if you can’t touch it because it’s too hot… that’s too hot.
Rule of thumb was warm like your pillow in the morning is sufficient
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