Spindle clamps

Post date: Jun 2, 2013 4:27:03 AM

With finals over and parts in hand, I've made a little more progress.

Firstly, the clamps for my new spindle are taking form:

These were turned out of 3/8" aluminum on a lathe, after drilling out most of the hole diameter. There's about 0.01" of extra space between the spindle and the clamps (total), which should be close enough to clamp it in.

Second, my cooling pump arrived (a while back, actually):

I don't have anything terribly exciting to say about it, especially since I haven't even tested it out yet.

Finally, I've fiddled with my steppers some more. They were originally wired with the coils in series which, while reducing the current requirements, evidently causes torque to drop off quickly as angular velocity increases. Re-wiring one of them (as a test) to be in parallel and increasing the current accordingly allowed the stepper to run at up to around 1.2 in/s. Of course, that's on the axis with little resistance/nice bearings (X), and with microstepping set to 1/2 (This web page has some of the reasoning; plus reducing the microstepping means reducing the step rate means maintaining higher torque for a given linear speed), but it's still encouraging.

The goal for the rest of this weekend is to re-wire the rest of the steppers and get the new spindle mounted (not running; that seems like a bit of a lofty goal for one more day).