How to Install a Spindle on Your CNC Router

hello my CNC brother or sister I'm Garrett with IDC Woodcraft the company you get your CNC router bits from in this video we're going to do a walk through of how to install a spindle on your CNT router now in this video I'm walking through the Long Mill MK2 but many of the principles are the same for all the CNC machines based on the spindle installation so what we're going to do is we're going to be going through step by step of all things we've had to do to install this spindle on the Long Mill one of the things I did you'll notice in the video is some components are missing on a Long Mill as I'm shooting this video that's because I did a maintenance overhaul on the machine and as I was doing that maintenance I was taking parts off and put them back on so you'll notice that some parts are not on the machine in the earli part of this video and that's why another thing is this video is a step by step of all the things that you have to do when you're installing this particular spindle which is a water cooled spindle so it's a little bit lengthy but at least you're going to know all the little tiny details and all little things you need to get outside of your spindle in order to install a spindle on your CNC router now to start this off this spindle came from a company called pwncnc pwn sells spindle kits what they are plug and playay normally what you have to do is you when you buy a spindle you have to figure out all the wiring and what have you pw1 CNC has put together a system so that if you have a CNC for newbies a Long Mill MK2 or onefinity milite a few others where you buy those kits it's literally Plug and Play That's the spindle part but actually getting things ready like running water lines and what have you that's going to take a little bit longer to run everything through so that's just a little heads up as to the length of this video all the little things we have to do as we're getting that spindle set up now if you have a trim router on your CNC router you've probably been hearing about spindle upgrades the reason is is because spindles are so much better than than the trim routers much quieter Built For This long-term operations of CNC routers as opposed to the trim routers which are really just manual machines designed to run for a very short period of time so once you go spindle you'll never go back and you'll find out once you upgrade your machine you're going to see a lot of people upgrading to these spindles because they're so much better in this video or in the description of this video there are links for everything and I've got a PDF for you that talks about all the stuff that you have to get it's not a whole lot but you do have to get some accessories outside of the spindle itself so make sure you check out the description of this video and let's just get rocking and rolling on this spindle installation IDC woodcraft.com when you upgrade your CNC router to a spindle whether you're doing a one Infinity Long Mill Mill right chipoco there's several things you're going to have to get and first of all is of course the spindle kit now we have pwncnc which is the company that has actually built a plug-and-play device for these various machines I will link this information Down Below in the description and also links to PWS so you can see exactly what they have and what you want for your machine but I'll give you more description down below and of course you need the spindle which they will provide and the control and the various elements that's going to make your spindle work on your CNC router and then you're going to need rocket Hardware that's going to mount the spindle in some cases like in mine with the long Mill MK2 they have come up with a very nice upgrade to the spindle Mount that is currently on the machine so that's what you need to make sure you need to get these plates and then of course the other various hardware and the next thing you're going to get is new drag chain now you will only need this new drag chain if you are getting the water cooled spindle so this is a larger drag chain than you will find on your benchtop CNC routers and that's because we need to run water lines through the drag chain for the water cooled spindle that I'm using which is what I recommend the water cooled spindles they last longer it's a little few more components but they last longer and they're much much quieter than the air cooled spindles so you want to get the drag chain of course I'll have that linked down below and if you're getting the water cooled spindle which I again recommend you're going to need to get the water pump which comes from PW CNC the hose and you want to make sure you have the flexible hose again I'll link that down below and then we're going to need to get a bucket and I'm going to use a 5 gallon bucket I'm going to use windshield washer fluid for mine now this is recommended after doing quite a bit of research the reason we're using that is because we want to protect our equipment against freezing some people put water in a water cooled spindle but the problem is if your shop gets below freezing that water's going to freeze and when water freezes it expands and I can guarantee you that is robust and heavy as this spindle body is that expanding water will not stop it can literally crack that housing and ruin that spindle so we're going to go with this already researched it we're okay and then we need grommets here that are going to basically seal the bucket we're going to stick the tube Through The Grommet and so there's going to be two hoses going in here the pump is going to be inside the bucket now one other thing you're going to want to have is if you get the water cooled where you need uh other things to turn on when the machine turns on meaning when you hit the Go Button you want this water pump to turn on so the other thing you're going to need to get is what's called an iot relay and this is connected to your control for your CNC router and what that's going to do is when a signal gets sent it's going to engage this iot relay at the same time it starts your G-Code program and that's going to send power to this which will turn everything on that you have hooked up to it you're going to have lights and your water pump what have you so those are the things that you're going to need again I'm going to list them all down below and in order to accommodate the water lines because I'm using a water cooled spindle I have to install new and wider drag chains so I had to pick three of these up from Amazon if you're upgrading to a spindle this is one of the things that you're going to need to get now this is the the original drag chain this is the wider version and if we take a look at I can't it's over here and before I even do anything further I'm going to pop open all these Gates and then we'll bring it around and connect it here okay can't lay them back in until see so this needs to go around to here so we can see that this here is the motor for the X drive and that needs to be exposed so I know that I have this much too many links on this so I'm going to have to knock some of these links off just like that all right and now what I need to do is lay the the water lines through here so I can work with them later on and it's time to run all our wires at this point I'm getting ready to run the wire for the spindle control to the spindle so one of the things you want to make sure of is the connectors themselves are running the right way now if you look at the connector you can see there's a male version and a female version so we want to just double check which side is going to go out to the spindle on the zc carriage so when you look at your spindle we're going to see it this is the male here four prong and we got a four-prong male here just double check make sure that it plugs in properly and it is keyed so it can only go in one way and so we're just going to spin it around and there it is so this is the spindle side this side is going to go through the drag chain out to the [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] spindle [Music] [Music] for now one of the things about adding this bigger drag chain to the Z carriage and everything thing is you're going to have to drill a couple holes into it to make it fit because at least in the Long Mill the the bracket slot goes that way this is the MK1 and so I had to drill an extra hole right in the bracket here I need to move it down because if you look around here right there this wire right there was actually dragging on the chain and so I had to move the whole drag chain down so it wasn't rubbing the wire to the motor these brackets right here are actually going to get in the way these the brackets that came with the long Mill these little type brackets that hold the drag chain and so we're going to have to remove them and leave them off permanently the drag chain will support itself so I'm okay with that and if not then I'll come up with an alternate bracket so we're taking these guys [Music] off and now the drag chain you can see is supporting itself for the most part I'm all I may come up with a bracket hold but now we're just going to move the carriage all the way down make sure this drag chain doesn't bind anywhere that's what I'm looking for so we're good that way and we're going to come back the other way oops there we go and of course we're watching all our wires to make sure they don't hang up on anything as we're doing it and the drag chain is doing quite well all the way down nothing is hanging up but I do have to put a new bracket on for the drag chain cuz you can see the weight of it is pulling it down not a big deal I'll figure it out the way that I have secured this drag chain is very simple I had this self drilling screw it's just sitting in my toolbox and I just ran it down into the drag chain right there drilled right into it and right into the frame of the longmill and that now makes the drag chain very secure the one thing you just want to make sure is when you do that that you know where this drag chain is going to lift up at when it's all the way over because you don't want to screw it in at a point where it's going to try to lift up when the whole Carriage is moving over so move it all the way over here you'll get you from your mark your area where you want to drill it through use one of these screws you can buy them at any hardw store I'll link it down below and then uh you'll know how to secure your drag chain now I had to stop put the machine together because I made an error I thought I had ordered the 65 mm spindle which is a 1.5 kwatt spindle for my Long Mill but I had actually ordered the 80 and when I ordered the mounting bracket with it I had ordered the 65 mm mounting bracket so you can see here the size of the hole relative to the to the uh size of the spindle is definitely the wrong size so I to get the right one for the 80 diameter unit but this just sends home a point that when you're ordering all these components the spindle the mounting bracket the hose and what have you the drag chain that there's quite a few things to take into account so again down below in the description there is a PDF of everything you want to take into consideration when you're buying your spindle and which ones you want for which machine for example if you have the one Infinity the milr the chipoco the Long Mill just make sure you get that PDF when you decide to get your spindle so I'm going to just replace this bracket and then we're going to mount the spindle on here and then we're going to Plum things up and move on now one of the important things is to make sure you don't tighten all the screws down just yet we just want them to be uh just touching before they clamp and we don't want to clamp this down until we get the spindle in here on this side where we have the split cuz this is where it's going to actually clamp down onto the spindle from this side so now it's time to put the spindle on this is where we're getting really really close but we still have quite a bit to do anyway I want to make sure that the pwn is facing forward it's just a cool logo that they engraved on the spindle so it does drop drop right in uh I am going to tighten these two screws down the reason I was waiting to tighten everything down is because I want this bracket to be sitting parallel with this bracket here so I want the screws the the housing to rest on the screws and then I'm going to oh grabbed the wrong wrench going to put just snug that one in place and I'm going to Snug this one in place then we're going to give it a little bit of a tightening I'm not going to overtighten because we are working with aluminum plates here and we can strip that out if we go too much now before I move on there's one other thing I want you to be aware of spindles have more weight than the trim rouers like the Makita here substantially more weight and some CNC routers when the machine is actually doing the carving and it it sets its height the motors that are driving your different axes May shut off it's not uncommon for that to happen meaning no more power is going to the motor when we have this much weight on the machine that that can cause some drift because there's nothing holding the motor in place place so once we have everything set up we're going to go into our Control software and I'm going to tell you what code you need to enter into it so that when the machine stops and the Z axis Finds Its position it'll stop moving the motor but the motor will have power to it holding the motor in place so that the weight of the spindle doesn't force it to drift over time it's very important thing that we want to take into consideration whether you have a 65 mm spindle or the 80 mm sple all right we're going to put this guy in and the way I'm going to set this is I've got this little step here and for now that's where it's going to be that step is going to be at the bottom of this bracket just like that I'm going to hold it with my hand Orient my my Pawn the PW n symbol forward and so we've got quite a bit of weight on here so you just want to be careful don't get your fingers underneath while you're doing this because if you drop it you have uh several pounds that's going to drop right on your finger and it's going to hurt and it could break a bone when it comes to clamping around a diameter when you have the full circle clamping on it that's the absolute strongest way that something can actually clamp onto a round object so we don't need to have a lot of force there is a ton of grip that is going on right now all right so next thing we're going to do is we are going to start Plumbing everything up now one of the things I would maybe not recommend is closing up the drag chain before you get things wired up the one thing you want to make sure of is when your spindle is all the way up you have enough wire that it's not going to start pulling on your drag chain same with the hoses we've got the spindle all hooked up now and all the wires and hoses are run through the the Gantry the drag chain next is to mount the vfd or variable frequency drive this is the brains to the spindle this is what controls it but there are a couple other things we have to do we have to wire this up to the control of the Long Mill and we also have to run the plumbing to its source where the water is going to come from to cool the spindle but I've got a little bit of a problem before I start that and that is over here on this side of the machine I've got a mess of wires I had them all bundled up nice and needly bit neatly but we've got a whole bunch more wires so what I'm going to do is really just get this off the top of the table we're going to just do a little cutout here below the control so I can run wires down and then we're going to come back up right here around the drag chain where all the wires go in and then I will get to getting the vfd set up but one of the things I want want you to think about with your vfd is where you want to mount it now some people I've seen they'll mount it underneath the machine which to me is inconvenient cuz you're going to have to reach down and and read the little gauge there and turn it on and off I'm going to mount it on the side of the table right near all my other controls that are running the CNC my stop button where all the power switches are all that stuff I want it convenient to me but also out of the way of the motion of the machine so we'll get to that we're going to get this wire and straightened [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] up [Music] [Applause] [Music] and we are done after about maybe 45 minutes I got everything rerouted just cut a couple holes in the table just took all the wires underneath I still have to bundle them up down here but you can see my whole work area is clear there's nothing that's going to catch up in the wires and now we are going to work on getting the water pump hooked up it's going to be very quick and then we're going to get the vfd mounted I'm going to make a table extension right here uh depends on what space I have right here I may just mount it right here on the table we'll see in just a little bit we're going to take care of the plumbing first in order to hook up the coolant you're going to need some accessories and we're going to run through them here what you're going to get from pwn CNC and what you need to get so you come forward first thing we going to do this going to be very basic we are going to use a 5 gon bucket and I just purchased a bucket from Lowe's and you want to have a top to the bucket the next thing you're going to need is the fluid now I'm using windshield washer fluid I have done a little research on that and this stuff is going to be very adequate for what we're doing from pwn you'll need the water pump and with the water pump you're going to get the brass fit in you'll get a you'll get this plastic fit in you'll get the plastic feet for the pump and this is a submersible pump so it's going to actually sit in the bottom of the uh the bucket here the next thing you're going to need are some gromets now this is The Grommet that you want again everything I'm listing here it'll be in the PDF down in the description you want to get that PDF and download it so you know everything you need to get whether you get a water cooled spindle or or an air cooled spindle so this is the packet you need to get and in that packet you're going to have these sets of grommets we are going to use the second to smallest because that is what's going to fit on the hose just like that now what we're going to do is we are going to drill holes in the top of the bucket lid and we're going to insert the grommets here and we'll bring the two water lines through the bucket and then one of them will be hooked up to this brass fitting which will be connected to the water pump that will be the outbound and then the other hose line will just go right in the bucket it's going to be just open and that will be the return line now one thing we are not going to use this bigger fitting we are going to use the little brass fitting that came with it and I don't think we need this but I'm going to do it anyway is use Teflon tape on the brass fitting this is something you can pick up at any hardware store again this will be on the PDF as well the PDF has all the links that you'll need so you can just order everything online you don't have to travel to the hardware store and when you use the Teflon tape just wrap a couple piece couple times around and then you can just screw that right into the top of the pump and it does feel like that is something that we need as a matter of fact I need a couple more wraps on that because that thread was too loose inside that thread on the pump so I'm going to wrap it around a couple more times and what this does this just helps to seal to seal the uh keep any water from coming out between these two threads and just going right back into the bucket we want all the water pressure to go into the little hole there so I'm going to run that in now and that feels a little bit better it's going down properly it feels snug that means that the threads are gripping and I'm just going to take my wrench and just give it a little snug this is a plastic housing so we got to be careful we just want things to be tight enough that is holding and we're set like that so now I'm going to drill three holes in this lid the first two are going to be for The Grommet and I'll just make them next to each other anywhere and then on the opposite side I have to drill an inch and a qu in order to fit this plug up through this this lid and out to its power source so when you're drilling holes on something like this as you know it can grab so we're just going to put it down here on this piece of MDF and I am simply going to step on it and drill anywhere in there now for the the the plug I have this is all I have it's a 1 and a/4 in spade and it's not a very good Spade to be using on this plastic but it's what I have and we make make do with what we have so I'm just going to go on the other side and we're going to and there we are and we're inserting our grommets really they're very easy all you have to do is simply start it squeeze squeeze it into that slot all the way around and then just work it in until everything sits in right here we go give it a little spin that grommets in and take the next one and get it in now when I insert The Grommet the hle is going to be a little bit smaller to insert the hose but that's okay we're just going to have to work with what we have that one's there I'm going to give a little spin just to get that grommet to seat both of them and the trick is can I use the grommets in here no not really so we can go I probably drilled that a little bit big maybe I would try an inch first and then go to the bigger size if you need to so we've got that ready that's just going to need to go in there we now need to get the water lines hooked up now my water lines are going through the table so I'm going to run this down through the table just like that and do it from below this time I won't be so assertive as I'm pulling it through and I'm going to support to grommet for the waterline connector this is a two-piece thing that you're going to get and what this is It's a quick disconnect you'll install the or insert the water line into a little knurled fitting underneath this nut and then you'll screw this feral nut down over the water line and it'll actually C clamp down on the water line and then when you're ready you just push that down and it's locked in and if you need to remove it you simply pull up and it comes off and you see there's no drips coming off these types of fittings are designed to have absolutely no drip so that's very nice type of fitting here and I'm hopefully I'm going to be able to get this pump to stick to the bottom not that it matters but we're just going to wet wet the suckers fingers but we'll go with it and it's stuck good now I'm keeping the hose lines separate from all my other wires that are hanging down because I just want to keep everything organized as much as possible I want to make sure that the the hoses in there enough which I am very comfortable with so I'm going to take one hose and hook it right to the Brass fitting just like that now on this on the spindle there's not an inbound and an outbound uh circuit on that side on the spindle so I'm not really worried which one I plug in but if it's wrong if there's some kind of problem I have those quick disconnects I can switch them real quick on the spindle one of the things about those disconnects on the spindle is they don't leak when you pop that off you won't get any drips they're designed to have no leaks so we're going to bring that cord through and go about like that I'm going to pull this back I don't want the the hose to spiral around too much in there not that it really matters and we're going to fill this up with the coolant now and then we're going to test and make sure everything works that's the way I get that aluminum popped off so and we're going to do this before we put power to the machine so I got to make sure I unpower the machine but we're going to power the pump and the reason I'm going to do that is because if we have leaks going all over the place I don't want to get a short right away and if I don't have enough coolant here I've got two gallons I can just add some water to it it'll reduce the the freezing point or increase the freezing point now is the moment of Reckoning everything's unplugged except for the pump which I'm going to plug in right now so come on in close so you can see the water coming out from the brass fitting and let's see what happens there it goes come on up to the spindle take the spindle come up to the spindle okay now we're going to let that run for a little while let the air bubbles work out of it and we're going to M monitor for leaks and also I want to make sure there's there there's volume of uh water that's being taken up in the hoses all the way through the circuit so I want to make sure that the pump doesn't go below water level it doesn't pull up so much water into the hoses that we uh lose submersion on the pump I'm going to add another gallon of water to this CU I want to make sure our pump stays below any evaporation over time that might work its way out of this hole but I'll seal this hole that way evaporation won't really happen now that we've got the water hooked up and working the next is getting the vfd or the variable frequency drive mounted and secured one of the first things is to not just set this thing on the table somewhere where it can vibrate off and fall on the floor PW is providing two different ways for you to Mount Your vfd the first one if you come in the back is something they call French cleat now they're going to give you this plate right here and you can see on the plate it's got a little bit of an angle on it on the top this Plate's going to mount against a flat surface perhaps here and you'll hook it right onto the machine right there and that will hold it actually quite securely French cleat mounting is a very common way and a very strong way to hang things signs that you might make or it's used all over the place anyway that's a French cleat the other way is these brackets that they send with the unit and if you come in close you can see there's three holes in the bracket one two 3 and it matches up with the holes in the panel for the control for the vfd and same thing on the other side you have the same thing and then you can just bolt this against whatever you're going to do so what I'm going to do is my vfd this is actually not a bad spot to have it right there I'm going to make a back plate that will come up at an angle here and then I'll either use a French cleat or I'll use these brackets I'll probably use a French cleat because with the French cleat I can just lift this off and move IDC woodcraft.com at this point we've done quite a bit of work to get the spindle installed on the Long Mill MK2 and the stuff that I've been showing you if you don't have a Long Mill you have another CNC router you can follow along for the most part with this stuff all the principles on this are pretty much the same so if you feel like I'm helping you and this spindle transition that you may be doing from a trim router to a uh spindle which I highly recommend and give me a thumbs up down below and if you feel like I've missed something you got some questions of course down in the comments leave that question and I'll answer that one of the other things that I just want to share with you is one of the things that you want to do as a CNC Creator when we're creating our projects we do a lot of setup on our project I mean you can't run it without setting it up the problem is setup steps when you're setting your CNC project up there are specific steps that you have to do and when you have a broken bit right in the middle of a project or the carve gets ruined or the project moves it's usually because you missed a step during the setup and and that's why I came up with the CNC project setup checklist now what this checklist does is basically like a pilot's checkout checklist before he takes your airplane up into the air to make sure that plane is going to fly safely the checklist make sure that your project is going to carve exactly as you expect without having problems there's quite a few steps on here as you can see these are all the things we actually do every single time you do a setup on your CNC router and I've seen more router bits break and projects get ruined because someone just missed a step during the setup and that's why I created this so from IDC Woodcraft this is available to you for free I'm going to link this checklist Down Below in the description of this video I suggest that you get this and use this every time from now on to before you start doing your carvs because this will save you a lot of problem and unexpected errors on your project this works get it it'll be linked down below so we're going to get back to the spindle installation so I have made a bracket for the vfd and I'm taking advantage of the French cleat as opposed to the hard mounting brackets you can see I just made this little frame here just come on around and see how I've got that built and it's just screwed down to the table screwed the French cleat to this upright and we are simp going to hang it and what I've done is just in case just throw a little screw on the top here that will hold that in place so it doesn't vibrate off but it's quick to remove if I need to and I'll watch my finger that's all I need and this point I can't take that off it can wobble around if it's an issue I'll just change the way I've got it set up at this point we have to get the vfd connected to the Long Mill so here's what you are going to need for your machine whether you doing Long Mill one Infinity The Mill right or chipoka or whatever other machines they have again I'll list all that information down in the description but we're going to need the power cord for the vfd which is a regular 110 cord we have this cable here which is going to connect into your control box on your CNC router so in this case we have the Long Mill control and we're going to use this connector right here it says spindle and we're going to have a little adapter here as well that we're going to use and then finally we have our little instructions that we need to follow in order to just wire this up properly so we come into this instruction here when we look at this wire we've got two four six 7 1 2 3 4 five six seven wires they are telling us to use the black and the red and we wanted to pay attention to the configuration or the orientation of how that's going into the connector I'm going to pull the connector which is this one right here and we're looking at it like that so the red is going to go in on this side the black is going to go on this side you'll know because the connector cannot plug in into the control box on the Long Mill that way it only goes in that way and then the rest of the wires the white yellow green orange and the ground are all going to be covered up so I'm just going to pull those back and I'm going to just tape them back to the wire we're going to connect it to that and then this is going to plug into this little box now this is the interface this is the magic tool that PW and CNC is put together for your machine that's why when you buy your spindle you're going to designate which machine you are buying it for so they know which control to put in all right I'm going to put this thing together and then we're going to turn it on now we're going to put the wires into the connector that goes into the Long Mill connector and again we're going to orient it the proper way I know that this is the top and you'll know it's the top because it can't fit in that way where the screws are exposed so we're going to turn it that way and we're going to line it we have the red that goes in on one side and the black goes in on the other once you have those all the way in simply spin it over and start to tighten down one of the screws so now we have the wire connected and you'll always want to double check when you have to do the wiring against your instructions to make sure that you have wired things up properly and I have so this will Connect into the spindle Outlet on the Long Mill which is this prong one below the white one for this particular control board we're going to bring it up from the bottom and I'm going to plug her in and what I'm going to do is I am going to secure all these wires with zip ties when I'm done because that can easily pull out any one of these wires can pull out with enough Force now we're going to take this control this little transfer control and I'm going to plug it into the only one that'll plug into if we look over here we can see there's there's one two three four different connectors this one has one two three four five six prongs in it and there's only one connector here that has six prongs in it so that is the one that's going to be we're just going to spin it around until it fits in right way there it is and it should slip right in and then we're going to turn the little locking screw now one of the things I didn't think about when I was setting this up was this hanging out the side so I'm going to have to come up with some way to Simply secure it to the side of the machine or on the control box so that it doesn't get hit I may have to move this control box going get the other end of the connector and for now I am simply going to connect it up to this box so this is going to the control the Long Mill control and we're simply going to do the same thing we're going to put it on there and turn it until it drops in and now we are connected and finally we simply need to get the power cord and get that plugged in the power cord goes on the other side and that is going to drop right down into the hole that I made there and it'll go to my power supply for now I've got this uh power strip sitting here temporarily I'm have another power strip coming that I can actually bolt to the table so I'll link that down below too I suggest that you do that because you're going to have mult multiple things plugged in in this whole setup kind of tighten here I have to make sure the wire the routing of the wire does not come across the motion of the machine so there's no abrasion going on I may I'm likely going to have to move this box around I'm upside down finally we have to connect connect the spindle itself to the box so we can test it from that point on so let's just get that connected going to bring that up the side as well and this is a four-prong connector and we are looking for this one right here just going to bring it in and then we're going to turn that until it drops in there it is and now we're going to turn the power onto the spindle now you'll notice on the vfd this switch here it's not an onoff switch this is whether it's going to be running Auto or manual and what that means is auto is if you're running a G-Code it will work through the gcode manual is you have to turn the spindle on manually so if I'm on manual just to test the spindle out it come on over here and we can push the button and the spindle will turn on and we can so the spindle is turning on and we can adjust this little knob to the spindle speed that we want if you switch it to Auto the spindle just turned off because there is no G-Code command that had it turned on so when you're running a G-Code you want to make sure this is always in auto otherwise the machine will start to run the spindle won't turn on and you'll break a router bit and we're going to hit the on button and if we look over at the spindle the spindle is now turning now I want to give you an idea of how quiet this is I'm holding the microphone right next to it while talking 1 2 3 4 5 when you first test a spindle you want to make sure it's turning in the right direction and when you first run a G-Code to it and it turns it on you want to make sure that that G-Code is turn it on in the right direction so you're going to run a little test program without a project on your on your machine so at this point looks like we've got everything running there's one more thing we have to do and that is we need to connect our iot relay the iot relay is going to connect to the vfd through this guy right here and what this does is when when the code gets sent to this box to turn the spindle on it's also going to send a signal to the iot which is going to send power to these four Outlets here so we're going to have a private a separate power supply plugged in right here that's going to go to our main power strip and it's going to trigger a relay and when those relays get triggered these four ports will turn on and one of those ports is going to turn on the water pump at the same time and when the signal gets sent by the G-Code to turn the vfd off the water pump will also turn off so we've got four four different accessories we can plug into this thing that we will want to turn on when it starts to run maybe you want to put a a little LED light on it so the LED light turns on when when you start to run it so we're going to connect this up real quick and we're going to test it with the water pump as well for the sake of time I have shortcut it just a little bit where I have mounted my iot switch here I'm going to move it to a different location I still have to bundle up all my wires but for the sake of this video this is pretty much done I want to show you how the iot is set up so if you come on down here on the iot we have two outlets these are normally on and then when power is sent to this device these will turn off these two are normally off so when power is sent to the device it'll turn on so the iot has a plug it's plugged into a temporary power strip and here it is connected directly to the the VF uh the variable frequency drive now one of the things you want to make sure of when you're connecting the iot there's a negative and a positive here and there's a negative and a positive here so you just want to make sure you align them properly it's listed here what side is negative and positive and on here it is also listed which side is negative and positive it's printed right on there so white wire I've got the white wire on my negative and I've made sure sure I did the white wire negative over here now here's how this works the pump is now plugged in and when I turn the spindle on the water pump's going to turn on so we simply hit the green button and we're going to turn the spindle up a little bit to some speed that's going to be uh 80 about 8,500 the spindle is on and the water pump has kicked off on I can see a few bubbles running through there and when I turn the spindle off using the little red button on the control that's going to turn off and the iot switch has turned off and the water is no longer pumping one more thing we have to do is tell the Control software in my case it's genter we have to tell it that there is a spindle attached to the machine now now Pawn CNC has given the instructions as to what you need to set in the software in case you don't know so based on this document we are going to go into the firmware of genter this is specifically what they're showing here is the genter because this is for the Long Mill for your unit they're going to show you what you need in the genter Control software we're going to go to Firmware now we're going to make sure the settings are set right and we bring up this screen now we're looking for number 30 31 and 32 so we'll scroll down and 30 is maximum spindle speed on the sheet here it says 2400 so we're going to just simply change that number to 2400 RPM and then the next one minimum spittle speed is zero and the Las uh laser mode enabled as spindle that's disabled we're set there so at that point we are set we're going to reset that right there then say eom value uh reset single reprom we're going to say yes and that is set and so now that's taken care of now it's just a matter of Designing uh just running a little simple program make sure everything works right now there's one other thing that we have to take into account here we've added weight to our z-axis and when you do that depending on how your CNC router set up that may pose a problem later on but there is a way to fix that and it's very easy so that problem is we have added weight and as your machine is cutting that weight can actually make the The zc Carriage drift down if your stepper Motors are not in their holding mode in other words when the Z Carriage is moving up and down based on what the G-Code is telling it to do and it stops then the motors will shut off there will be no power to them and as it's making a cut it can actually vibrate just slightly in the machine and that can cause the weight can just cause the whole spindle to drift downward so we want to turn on the motor locking function so that when the motors stop there's still power to them and that will literally hold them in place so what I mean if you come up here right now I am just going to turn that shaft and I can turn it easily and the spindle is going down it goes down a lot easier than it goes up because of the weight so we're going to go back into the firmware on gender and we are going to go to step idle delay and you should have a number of 100 in there we're going to change that number to 255 you can see right here it says uh change the value 255 it keeps the motors enabled with no delay and so what that means is there's going to be power held to it so I typed in 255 I'm clicking off on the side and then down here it says to apply the settings we're going to apply the settings and now we have 255 here currently that has not changed anything here we have to now jog the motors and that will lock the motors in and they will start so I'm going to move it up a little bit going to jog it up and now I cannot turn this motor the motor is now locked on and the all the other Motors are locked as well so they'll turn but they're holding power to it and you can hear hear it I can hear a little bit of a hum which is telling me the motors being held which is exactly what we want and that will take care of that problem now I have written a temporary quick program so that I know that the spindle's going to turn on when the gcode turns on or when I tell gender or whatever Control software you're wer using to start the program now before we actually start we do have to do one more thing and I want to just clarify this little switch right here you notice here it says Auto and on the other side it says man now what that means is you can turn the spindle on manually or you can have it turned on automatically and automatically is through the G-Code you want to make sure that that's turned to Auto so that when you start the machine the spindle will turn on when the G-Code tells it to if you have it on manual the spindle will not turn on so we want to come in close to this control here and the first thing you want to do is hit the green button right there and we are on auto so now we are ready for this spindle to turn on with the G-Code and we are simply going to run this simple little zigzag that I have built up right here the it's the machine's there it's going to come over and do this the spindle should turn on as soon as as I as soon as it hits that line which is one of the first lines in the code so you can bring the camera up here close right to the spindle and basically I am simply going to start the sequence and you can see the spindle has now turned on and it is quite quiet now we got a piece hanging down here which I need to get up here this is the proximity sensor which I will wire up later at this point we have installed everything we need to do and we know the spindle's running there's two more things you have to do number one is tram the spindle so that the spindle is perpendicular to the machine and the second thing is is you have to set up what they call a dwell command a dwell command actually pauses the machine before it starts to actually go into carving because you got to give the spindle a little time to wind up the spindle itself does not just go start right up to speed like your trim routers do it takes about 3 or 4 seconds for it to get up to speed so we have to put in a pause command in our G-Code now I've got a video that explains exactly how to set that up so I'm not going to do that in this video what I'm going to do is put a flag right here or right here in the video it's going to pop out and that flag is will lead you to that video but I'm also going to link it at the end of this video so you can go straight to that and it's going to be down in the description so we're going to get into this tramming process which is very important that's making sure the machine is totally perpendic particular cuz if you don't have that you're going to start having steps in your projects so let's get on to the tramming part of this so we're going to get into the tramming of the machine here of the spindle relative to the spoil board there's multiple ways to tram your machine but tramming is vital because if you don't do it and the spindle is this is exaggerated is tilted like that and it makes Cuts it's going to leave funny Cuts in your project so we got to get it perfect so if you come here there like I said there are many ways to tram but I'm using what's called a tramming bar that I whipped up and what we have is just a piece of wood about 3/4 in maybe an inch wide and no 3/4 of an inch thick and I have two4 in pins on each side of it so what we're going to do is in the spindle here I'm just going to insert one side of that into the spindle I'm going to butt it all the way up and then we're going to simply just snug it up it doesn't have to be real tight it just needs to be tight enough that that this does not move just like that now remember these screws are still loose the screws that are holding the plate to the bearings so what I'm going to do first of all is just snug those screws down and just give it a little bit of a turn until they're just lightly seated going to do two of the screws on each side I'm not tightening them up because we still need to move this now you can see this spindle is moving and now I want to I want that to be a little tighter than what I've got it so we're going to Snug up a little bit more on the screws because I don't want it to slip once I have everything tighten down now I've done two and I'll just twisting it again and it's quite a bit tighter so now I'm going to Snug up the other four screws on the bearings and now what we're going to do with this this tramming bar we're going to use this we're going to spin it around 180° on that direction and then we're going to spin it 180° in this direction and what we're looking for is this pin here is going to be very close to the spoil board and then when we swing it around that Gap should be the same over here now to give you an idea this is about 11 in apart as far as where one pin is to the other pin so when we swing that around that's 22 in when we get that almost perfect then we are going to be very very very close to our perpendicular ity and we will be good to go so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this this pin down close to the spoil board and we want to be careful we don't want to go fast like I just went and I have to put my glasses on to see this cuz I wanted to get it a little bit closer so now I'm set on the slowest speed and that's what I want that's not touching so now we're going to swing it around 180° and I'm just checking for touch now I'm right now it's coming over the edge I don't want that so I'm going to move the whole Gantry back to about the middle of the machine right there now we can check everything and see we can just eyeball first like I said this is a very uh homegrown way of tramming your machine if you want to get really really close and tight and see exactly what those numbers are then you can use an indicator or a dial gauge um I'll link some uh tramming bars Down Below in the description but you want to make sure you've got the clearance for these particular gauges or indicators as well so this is just the quick way that you can do this if you don't want to go out and buy another gauge so now we're doing pretty good there and over here it's just starting to touch so I'm going to push it back just a little bit and it's probably going to touch over here all right it's just starting to touch right there and it's touching right here so my side to side now is good I'm very happy with this this is going to work out very well when it comes to CNC so I'm going to come in and I'm going to start to just lightly snug up each one of these bolts and I'm going to go back and forth and I'm not tightening it all the way just enough and we're just going to check again to see if things have moved and it just stops right here and it stops it's a little going a little bit past now there could be some deviation of my spoil board but it is very slightly past that swing that 180° and again we're 22 in apart this is a really really tight uh uh for CNC routers it's a very close tram the tram for the left and right or X is set now we have to fix the Y because it is out and when it comes to CNC routers and tramming front to back unfortunately it's not so much fun and this is across the board for all CNC routers we have to shim things so we come in here and we look at this trammy bar we're at the back and I've got uh I'm not sure what kind of Gap I have I'm not seeing it all the way but if I swing around I start I it stops which is telling me the tram is out now I can push I can give it a good push and start to get some forward movement on on it just a little bit but that's not the way we want to do it what we have to do if you come over here is because what I'm seeing here the back end is of the tramming bar is not touching the spoil board and the front is that means that the tram of this router is it is leaning forward so the tram of the router the router is leaning like this and that means I have to shim the bottom of this bar here to help it swing back out and this can be a little bit of a guessing game but what I will use for shim is a piece of regular paper and I'll loosen these bolts up and then we will slip a piece of paper in the bottom here and then I'll tighten it back down and we will recheck the tram the unfortunate part is when I loosen these bolts it could throw my X tram or this side to side tram off a little bit it's just part of getting our machines tuned up in the way we want to go so I am going to loosen these bolts up so I've put something under here just simply to support the weight because once I loosen these screws the whole spindle's going to drop and it'll bend my little tramming bar here so um I'm just going to have to do it like this this is one of those things that's going to forces us to be a little creative so what I'm doing is I'm taking this paper now and I am simply pushing it up in the bottom there so it's on both sides it's coming up and it's touching this screw head right there and that's my stop point so we're going to tighten everything down again spindle and everything and we want to get tight so I'm going to do the two bottom ones first because I'm going to clamp evenly on the paper and then we will do the top ones and what that will do that will pull it up we said everything up for the spindle for the PW kit you know everything that you need to add to your machine particularly if you have the Long Mill but it'll also give you ideas on your machine if you do not have a Long Mill you have another type of machine again remember the PW spindle is available as a kit it's basically plug andplay it's going to take a little bit of time to get it installed but other than that it's it's one hell of a nice little tool upgrade for your CNC router now there is one more thing to do and before we get to that I just want to remind you down in the description are links for the PDF that has all the stuff that you'll need to get for your spindle upgrade kit and videos I've mentioned and other things just make sure you take a look at the description the last thing you need to do is set up a dwell cycle for this so that your spindle has time to ramp up to speed otherwise it'll start carving be before it gets up to its proper speed now I'm going to save that for another video which I've already created and that's linked right here in this video you just hit this or again that'll be down in the description so I strongly recommend you upgrade to a spindle because a spindle is designed to have the long-term runs that we need out of our CNC routers the little trim routers aren't they burn out a lot so the link for the spindle this uh PW spindle kit is down below if this video is helpful please take a minute to give me a like and a comment down below things I might have missed or other tips and tricks for other creators who are thinking about upgrading to a spindle something that you have done to your CNC router as you upgraded to your spindle I do recommend water cooled because it is the quietest of the of the two options the other option is an air cooled and air moving through something makes a lot of noise so the water cooled very pleased with how quiet this spindle is and of all the things that I am enjoying about this spindle is the peace and quiet that I have rather than a screaming router links Down Below have a great day better tomorrow and happy cncn IDC woodcraft.com

Channel: IDC Woodcraft

Views: 6,358

Keywords: cnc for beginners, cnc router, Garrett Fromme, vectrix, longwood cnc router, long wood cnc router, long board cnc, idcwoodcraft, idc woodcraft, spindel, spindl, spindal, spendle, spindale, spindile, spundle, spindler, spindul, spenldle, cnc spindle upgrade, cnc spindel

Id: 6TRQJc3gx0Q

Length: 65min 32sec (3932 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024