Hey guys thinking about upgrading my spindle on the elite, currently have water cooled hy 1.5kw and it’s just seeming to be a little slow when hogging out and limited to the 1/4” bits is kind of annoying now. I don’t have 220v in the shop but I could run it if need be. Thinking about downing a 110v 80mm curious if anyone has it on their machine and can share their thoughts on it. If I go 220 then would probably do another hy set up to offset the cost of adding 220. Anyway I cut a lot of cedar and to get decent cuts on my profiles running a 1/4” jenny compression I’m maxing out at around 85ipm with .175 doc. Just curious what you guys run with the bigger spindles and how much of a difference it would make… and need an excuse to upgrade…again hahaha
I’ve been running the HY 1.5kw VFD powering a 1.5kw 80mm 1/2" collet (they sell the spindle as a stand alone) for a good while now and have no complaints what so ever. Due to power needs for future tools, I’m working on getting a 220 sub-panel installed and might upgrade to a 2.2kw afterwards. If you can easily enough get 220 in your garage, that will be the way to go for future proofing…
Hope this helps
I would step up to 220 rather than just an 80mm 1.5 if i was you, but those cut settings seem to be extremely conservative. Is there a reason you think more power is required? 0.175 doc at 85 ipm is very light. Youre right that a 220 would bring drastically more power to the job, but i almost never see my 220 spindle pull more than 4 amps (using the possibly unsafe assumption that the readout on the device is correct).
Cadence mfg has a very conservative speed and feed list here and their pictures show a Makita router being used- and theyre running both faster and a lot deeper than you are.
Realistically your 1F will probably never be able to run at speeds that a 1/2 endmill will require, a lot of them call for 500+ IPM in wood. I use them sometimes but even with an er20 collet i use 1/8 and 1/4 endmills 95% of the time other than when surfacing (and i also like 1/2 inch v bits).
Hey guys thanks for the replies. Think I’ll go the 220 route…but in response for the cadence feed chart, that’s what I’ve used to start and pushing 100ipm for .25” doc (profile pass) worked okay 95% of the time but if it had to cut along a bigger knot or unusually hard spot in the wood it would bog down and and trigger the machine to stop. Kind of why I’m thinking the spindle isn’t putting out enough power. When hogging out it can do a .25” doc with .1 step over and 125 ipm but again that seems about the max. If I switch up to a larger diameter bowl bit it doesn’t really speed anything up because the depth of cut is drastically reduced…just what I’ve been experiencing from a 300$ Chinese spindle kit so I mean it is what it is. I’ll bite the bullet one of these days and do a 2.2kw 220 upgrade in the near future. Might even push it off long enough for the atc! No complaints at all with the bits or the machine though, been running almost daily for about a year with just some minimal periodic maintenance. Thanks for the replies!