OK, Back when I had the X-Carve i kept it in my un-cooled garage. I was having an issue with the router sometimes cutting across my workpiece, meandering roughly diagonally. Happened several times and the hive mind on their forum determined it was the steppers over heating and ceasing to function. Monitered and more or less handled the issue. (Handled by just not using the unit much when it was hot. Not prefered)
Now i’ve relocated to Thailand. And let me tell you, Texas Heat got nothing on this place, so I anticipate similar issues with the OneFinity…
I don’t have my OneFinity yet, but add to the heat issue that I’m planning to put the OneFinity in an unused upstairs. A Non-Air Conditioned upstairs… At least until I can get AC to the room. (AC to the living quarters first though…)
Other than dropping an AC in the room, does anyone have ideas on how to best cool the Steppers? I can affix cooling fins similar to those found on PC CPUs, and blow a fan across the unit, but is that the best ideas.
Bolt an aluminum heat sink to them with some thermal paste between them. If that’s not enough some small fans like you would find in a computer should be more than enough.
At one point I considered an aluminum fuel cell for a water tank, they make ones that have a separated compartment to hold ice to cool the water (or fuel in it’s intended purpose). If your ambient air temp is too high you could consider something like that.
If you really wanted to look like a geek you could get aluminum heat sinks and sandwich a Peltier device between them. One of the standard sizes is just a little smaller than a stepper. I think water cooling would work and doing it on the Y axis would be pretty easy but cooling the steppers that move (X and Z) would require more work and the potential for a leak would increase.
I’m running an 80mm water cooled 2.2kw spindle. I’m using a simple pump in a bucket with about 2 gallons of water in it on my cement floor. The water temp is about 75f and doesn’t change one bit. My plan was, if needed, to put a couple of those plastic ice things for a cooler in it if the temp looked like it was going to get too high. But clearly that’s not the case for me. The pump can move a lot more water than I need. In fact the fitting on the spindle are the bottleneck. I’m sure you could use a larger hose and split it to direct water to the steppers too. But I think I would just try an aluminum heat sink for a computer chip with a fan first.
Had to look up a Peltier device. Never heard of one. Oooo… Very interesting.
I like this idea better than water. I’m was worried water would leak all over.
4 steppers at 5 amps ea to cool… I’m thinking I should rig a dedicated power brick for them. Don’t feel comfortable piggy backing 20 amps off the 1F brick. Meh. I’m wanting to make a control box for the relays and such anyway.
Can’t for the life of me figure how they work. I mean, where does the heat go?
They advertise temps as low at -3 C. 10 for $26 on Amazon. I think I’m getting a couple just to futz around with them.
If nothing else, I can make a coaster that keeps your tea ice cold…
OK, I’ve had an opportunity to test the Peltier Devices I was excited about.
My thoughts on it, I don’t think they will work. At least not for this application of cooling steppers in a 35C+ environment.
They work by moving the heat from one side of the device, to the other.
Upon applying power to the device, it immediately got cold on one side and very hot on the other. The problem with this is that, just as one might expect, the device heats better than it cools. The heat from the device very quickly began overwhelming the cooling side. In less than a minute both sides were too hot to touch.
I added a heat sink to the heating side, and this helped for a while. However, even with 1 kg sheet of silver, it over ran the cooling capabilities. Submerging the heat sink into running water did allow the Peltier to continusly cool. Unfortunatly, at this point condensation off the Peltier became an issue. A moot point as I have no intentions of adding large bulky heat sinks to moving steppers anyway…
I conclude that the Peltier devices are only useful when conbined with a significant heat sink, and when cooling below ambient temperatures is needed.
Nerdgasm aside, if I will need to cool the Peltier with water cooled heat sinks, I might as well just use the water coolded heat sinks on the the steppers and ditch the Pelier middle man. If I need to cool the water tank below ambient, I will consider the Peltier for the water tank. (maybe)
Look into the fuel cells they use in racing, they can have a secondary tank where you could put ice in there to cool the liquid that’s circulating through the heat sinks.
