I made a video on how to protect your water cooled spindle from pump failures or kinks in the lines.
I use a coolant flow meter from Koolance with uses a Hall effect sensor.
Here it is.
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Pretty cool. I might do this. Clearly a better solution than my simple flow indicator.
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Hey buzzfab,
good suggestion. Having a sensor that detects spindle coolant flow is important. If you just have a dumb flow indicator you have to look at the machine all the time.
The cooling station I own has this already integrated. It sends an alarm if coolant flow or temperature have bad values:
Image: Alarm connector socket for flow and temperature alarm on cooling station Mechatron KG5000
Nice video. You explain every step very nicely.
Just one thing: When you solder two wire ends together, you normally twist the wires first, then add solder paste and only then solder. The reason for this is that this way the wires are not only connected by the solder, but also mechanically by the twisting. It is assumed that a connection must still hold if the solder melts (e.g. due to a short circuit). In this low-voltage application, this does not matter, but it is good practice.
– Image source: Wikihow: Kabel zusammenlöten
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Thanks for the information. This device for me is an add-on to a chiller I have that I will be sitting up. I have large aquarium chiller that has a titanium radiator and active refrigeration instead of a fan. I also have a smaller industrial chiller similar to the CW3000 but would prefer to use the active refrigeration one. I just need this for my temporary setup as I plan to move my shop to a new location in the the next coming months so I’m keeping the setup minimal for now.
You will find a lot of hobbyists are going to use very basic setups like the bucket and pump when first getting started due to cost, some might use it like that for years. I worked at a place that only had that basic setup in a commercial environment without a flow sensor but it had a huge reservoir so the temperature never got to high. There are many people with different needs and setups, This a inexpensive way to help those people protect there machines.
As for the soldering tips, part of my day job is soldering shit loads of connections for LEDs in custom commercial signage. I must have soldered 100,000 connected wires in the last few years alone. I know there are best practices but in reality I have never had to fix a bad solder joint between wires in at least a decade. I doubt most people on this forum or this community have as much soldering experience as I have. If you use enough flux you will never have problems, also I don’t have a 3rd hand at home but I don’t like using them anyway. If the connection fails, the alarm would be triggered anyway so I have 0% concern for this issue.
From what I can tell this Masso is way less reliable than my solder connection ever is, it glitches out all the time and all maso or onefinity can say about it is to just power cycle the controller. I have never needed to power cycle any of the other controllers on the machines I operate for work. Mach3 which was designed as a hobbyist PC-based controller is far more stable than this commercially marketed Masso device. LinuxCNC will pretty much stay running indefinitely without issues. Although I’m sticking with the masso for now. There’s a good chance I’ll be getting rid of it in the future if they don’t make some improvements. There’s a lot about this Onefinity Elite machine that I’m not happy with, so I’ve already picked up the stuff to build a new power box as I am gutting all of the electronics, motors and wiring. I am swapping in toroidal power supply to power 5 Dmm-tech AC servo motors/ drivers, Z brake, shielded cables, rotary 4th axis and proper e-stop setup with a Pilz PNOZ S2 safety relay.
I appreciate the info though, I’m sure it’ll help somebody.
Followed your excellent video with the “Coolant Flow Pulse Alarm” installation with perfect results. I played around with the MDI and “Manual” VFD to ascertain the alarm points, and both confirmed that the threshold occurs when the RPM drops to <6k, when the alarm halts operation and shutdown! This is an excellent monitor in automatic, so the operator does not have to constantly monitor, the machine does the work for us! Question, does the blinking in the F1-Input 23 be of any concern?
Thank You Buzzfab for your help, I highly recommend.
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