Yes, that can work, but at that price, the chinese spindles are cheaper,
and probably better.
David Lang
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Still busy with assembly - will post as soon as I have made my first cut .
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Hi, can I confirm the body length of the Dewalt DWP611 where the clamps and the arms go onto is 107mm? The total thickness of the arms and clamps stacked up together is about 106mm I think, so an extra 1mm is enough? I thought I read somewhere that the total gaps added up should be about 3mm, is that correct? Thanks
I bought a 800W spindle that is Ø65mm from Chinese ecommerce website Taobao, and also customised some rings and cylinders from aluminum pipes.
It seems that the Ø65mm spindle is similar to those smaller diameter ones, just that it has ventilation slots incorporated into the extra space afforded by the bigger diameter. The spindle alone is almost 3kg, hopefully it won’t be an issue for the plastic parts, especially the clamps.
The 2 split rings are put inside the clamps, and clamps onto the spindle as the clamps are tightened. I had 2 options for attaching the arms, one is a whole cylinder, so the arms rotate around this ring. The 2nd option is 4 separate rings that are designed to press fit into the arms, so the rotation occurs between the spindle and the inside of these rings. Unfortunately, the outer diameter of these rings were a little too big, I didn’t want to take the risk of spoiling the inside of the arms, so I chose to assemble with option 1.
Inspired by some talks by some members in the forum about making it easy to remove the spindle to change to other tools in the near future, I came up with a one-piece option, with the clamps and arms at the bottom of the cylinder, and a tight-seal bolt clamp similar to this at the top
to clamp onto the excess part of the spindle, since the spindles are usually pretty long. The design is something like this:
I would like to ask, for the 107mm part of the cylinder, does it make more sense to have it longer to accommodate the height of the uprights, which are around 90mm long? I have a step at the 107mm mark to stop the upper clamp from moving further up the cylinder, should I make it around 112mm, factoring in the length of the uprights and the thickness of the 2 clamps?
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Finally got my M4 assembled after waiting a while for the sleeve.
The sleeve comes in 2 parts due to the length, as my friend’s machine wasn’t able to turn poles that are too long without additional fixtures.
The shorter sleeve slots onto the spindle, while the longer one is where the arms and the clamp clamps to.
The shorter sleeve helps to position the spindle such that when the spindle is slotted into the M4, the spindle flat end almost flushes with the bottom clamp.
A tight seal bot clamp with a butterfly screw is used to tighten the spindle onto the assembly, but I may change the screw into a bolt and use a ratchet to tighten and loosen instead, as it gets quite hard to hand-tighten.
I have lengthened all the wires to the motors, and printed some 3D parts so that the PCB can be mounted on it’s own, and can be swiveled up when I need to remove the spindle. I still need to lengthen the wiring for one of the stepper motors so that I don’t need to unplug it when flipping up the PCB to remove the spindle.
For now, I have to unplug one of the stepper motors, flip up the PCB and loosen the bolt clamp to remove the spindle
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Thank you for documenting this, it is a lovely build! I’m thinking of getting a spindle myself, so I will have to make a sleeve as well.
Did you use a 240V spindle with a frequency inverter, or did you use a brushless DC motor?
And I assume you made a very tight fit between the router end of the spindle and the sleeve, as you dont clamp the spindle there. Did you make the inner diameter of the sleeve at the bottom end smaller?
I would love to hear how it is working,
Arjen
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I’m waiting on delivery of the same size spindle, I do like your pcb holder would you mind sharing the stl’s.
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My spindle is 220V with a frequency inverter. The sleeve is machined from a ID65mm and OD70mm aluminum pipe. The spindle is 65mm, so no machining was done on the inside of the sleeve. The shorter sleeve helps to ensure that the router sits squarely inside the taller sleeve, and the bolt clamp grips about 20mm of the sleeve, which in turn grips the spindle by about 20mm height, which also helps to align the sleeve to the spindle. Not sure when I’ll have the opportunity to start using it though, LOL.
I’ve attached the entire assembly file in step format, in case you want to make any changes. Do note that you’ll need to get some longer screws for some parts of the assembly.
PCBMountingAssembly v4.step (325.1 KB)
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Thankyou kindly👍