I built my machine back in spring of 2023 and it has run pretty well aside from the software side of things being buggy, or just not getting updated.
I was running some brackets made of 6061 aluminum this weekend and the machine stopped mid cut. Spindle shut down and the machine stopped feeding.
After some diagnostics it looks like maybe a bad winding in the spindle motor. Once it gets hot it loses a ton of torque. It won’t initiate rotation without assistance either.
Checking the ohms across the plug showed 0.8 to 1.0 ohms in any combination except ground. Which says there isnt a short, and the resistance is within tolerance the best I can tell. No faults on the spindle drive unless I cause them by disconnecting the encoder or give a spindle command with the motor unhooked. Otherwise it’s reading r 0 and will flash the run light for a split second when the motor is failing to start.
I sent an email to support for further assistance on getting a replacement motor ordered, but I was curious if any of you guys have had a motor fail yet. 3 years, and maybe 400 hours on the machine seems like an early failure to me.
Yes! Mine gave up the ghost as well. But I use mine a LOT. Thousands of hours on it if not tens of thousands of hours. I try not to abuse it too much but I definitely have some long nights with it.
Mine seemed heat related. I had it running for nearly 24 hours straight and it got very hot. I ordered a new one, and after it arrived I had the old one tore apart and put back together and they (local shop) didn’t find anything wrong with it and said it must’ve come out of alignment maybe with the brushes internally so I set the new one off to the side and am still running the old one.
This is the second time I had the machine shut off like this. The first time I didn’t do as much investigation and left it to sit for the week. The next weekend it fired right up and has been running for a few months without a hiccup until this weekend. I finally decided to track it down and try to find the cause. Could be thermal or maybe an encoder problem, but the drive didn’t give an error code for the encoder unless it was disconnected.
When it would shut down if I tried turning on the spindle to any speed with the manual spindle control it would cause the software to blink and pop up the window asking to home the machine. With the motor disconnected it would accept the spindle command and the software was fine.
I wish I knew how many hours were on the machine. My average parts that I use it for range from 30 minutes to 6 hours of run time. But there are times the machine may not get powered up for a couple of weeks if I’m between projects and nobody is needing my to do mill work.
I got a response from Jake and I gave him the information and diagnostics I had done. He seems to agree that the motor is failing. Replacement spindle motor was a little north of $400 with tax and shipping.
I had found a few other motors with different speeds which would need a driver swap and some editing on the software to make run correctly for around the same cost, plus the time to get it all working together. So the price for a drop in replacement wasn’t bad at all.
Once it arrives and is installed I’ll give it a break in cycle and give an update for anyone interested.
I installed the new motor last Friday (3 days ago) and ran a 20 minute program that runs the spindle at 1500, 4000, 6500, and 8,000 rpm for 5 minutes each. No stops or errors until toward the end I got a Hard Limit alarm. Turns out I mangled one of the Z limit switch solder joints when I was moving the spindle cover around. I remade the connection and ran the machine for about 8 hours over the weekend with zero stalls or alarms.
Thanks @langmuir-jake for answering the support ticket, reviewing my diagnosis, and helping to set the order up for the spindle motor.