LR3 80mm Water Cooled Spindle

Yes, I have a macro saved on my ESP for parking…as you suggested. It is great…Problem is if you stop or cancel a job when things go wrong, everything still crashes down…I need to figure out something, because I don’t always make it to parking time at the end of a job.

I am planning a LR3 build using an 80mm water-cooled spindle from amazon. Other than the super strong bracket so I need to modify anything to make it work? I understand that it may/will crash when power is cut to the Z.

@turpentine, so sorry for my delay in responding. I has been cold here and I didn’t get back to making sawdust again until yesterday.

For me, the crashing is only a problem if you need to cancel - estop a job. I have a saved routine that homes X axis and then parks again with the spindle in the middle of the gantry. This seems to “level” the weight between to two lead screws and prevents the crashing drama that happens when power to the steppers is removed and the spindle is near X-MIN or X-MAX.

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Any plans on making a 65mm version? my 3d modeling skills are lacking LOL

https://www.printables.com/model/360285-lr3-65mm-spindle-mount

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Hi @jrs

is there a chance for you to upload the modified version of the 80mm mount to printables as the version there is the one with the vacuum hose mounted to the side. Maybe you can attach the cad files as well so I can add some vacuum shoe. Many thanks!

Almost 2 years into this now and I thought I would provide my post Christmas update. This year I made about 100 little heart ornaments for a themed Christmas tree. Did not even occur to me to take a picture of the tree, but while I was at it, I also cut out the panels / brackets for my new MP3DP!

Still do not have a dust shoe, but things are going great.

I managed to find a power setting “M906 Z1050” that seems to be a fair compromise between crashing/skipping at the either end and avoids downward spiral of driver overtemp current backoffs, at exactly the wrong time.

I may still consider an M8 based Z-Axis lead screw in the future.

One of the issues I have encountered with the water cooled spindle over the winter is actually cooling. I started with RV Anti-freeze in the bucket so no issues with frozen cooling lines, but the “spindle” lube does not like the cold temps, and the VFD would going into overcurrent protection very quickly. I spent hours trying to figure out how I had messed up the VFD config, only to give up!

The following weekend, when it was warmer in the shop, everything ran great! The solution I found was to install a small auto-temp aquarium heater, that pre-heats the coolant to (~80F | ~25C). This gets turned on when I plug in machine, and starts to circulate coolant to “warm” up the spindle. 15 minutes seems to be enough time to get everything up to temp.

MP3DP is working great. I will post my build in that forum shortly.

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It can’t have been two years… I am not that old… :sob:

You’re right, it just feels like it!

Hi, so you are using a big spindel with stock motors? i am currently in the market for a 1.5 kw air cooled spindle…any recommandations?

I am using the stock stepper motors recommended in the Bill of Materials.

If I could do it all over again, I probably would purchase a 65mm water cooled spindle, rather than the 80mm spindle. I can’t stress how much better the working environment in the shop is without the fan noise of an air cooled spindle.

I did use anti-backlash screws for the Z-Axis mounting, and these help the stepper motors hold the load at 1050 / 1100 mA power. Without them, when the spindle approached X-min or X-max, crashing would ensue.

I built a parking script that raises the gantry over a set of kickstands (you would need to calculate your middle, and max values).

G28 Z; G1 X-MIDDLE Y-MAX; G1 Z180

Hi, thanks for your input…damn, i did not order these, hope to get them here in Germany…
i will use sep. drivers, not onboard ones…
the electronic will be be using estlcam board and big drivers and 48 Volt power…

So for reference, I am using TMC2209(s) with an SKR PRO 1.2 board and a 24V power supply.

I haven’t seen a 65mm water cooled that’s still 1.5kw. I am running the vevor air cooled which is 65mm on my machines. It’s a ton quieter than a palm router but I’m not sure how much more than a water cooled. I wouldn’t mind switching to water cooled if I could get lower rpm than the air cooled 12k but I don’t really want to go up to the 80mm and move the bit farther from the core

My apple watch tells me 79-80 dBM at 1M when the spindle and dust collection are running together.

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