[tracyranson]

Hi Mark,

Im building a FLA-100 machine at the moment, im up to the wiring and electronics stage, which ive found is 90% of the job compared to construction of the actual mill itself. my build log is here Home
Im using a 2.2KW watercooled chinese spindle which is ER20.
These are heavy little suckers, id estimate it being around 6 kilo's

diyengineer on youtube has heaps of video's of the same kind of spindle running so you can get an idea of what kind of noise these things put out.

As far as watercooling is concerned, im using PC watercooling pump, radiator, resovoir and tubing. the PC stuff pretty much plugs and plays with the outtake/intakes on the watercooling chamber in these spindles. Dont forget to use distilled water in these things so you dont get colonies of bacteria setting up camp in your waterlines.

The VFD the chinese spindles come with was my one cause for concern. I ditched the one it came with and sourced a hitachi WJ200 constant torque VFD. but thats the subject of many other threads you can find here on the zone.

In a nutshell those spindles are by far better than using an off the shelf carpenters router, they are serviceable as far as the bearings are concerned, much quieter and you can run them alot longer constantly.

Here's a buying tip for those spindles, a year or so ago they were selling for around the 1K mark and now you can pick up a 2.2KW with a VFD for around $220 if you look for em. Look for the ones that have a "make an offer" tag and dont be afraid to go low. i made an offer for over 100 below what he was asking and it was accepted immediatly. He also shipped it to australia for nothing.

Good day, I built my own spindle system using an er11 the entire z axis weighs in at a whopping 2.9 pounds. I was planning on using a water cooled unit but I did not want the hassel of all the other stuff so I got creative.