Look Kyle Kerr and Paul Frederick! I wish I would’ve listened to y’all earlier. Didn’t take but a couple of hours to mount my Bosch Router to this machine. I thought it was going to be much more difficult. I could have saved a lot of time if I had gone ahead and done it when yall suggested it. I’m going to try to cut some tomorrow.
Routers work. But they’re noisy and the tool selection is limited because of the collet system on them. Although you can get adapter sleeves for collets. The 1/4" to 1/8" sleeve really extends the range of tools that you can use. Then you can use a lot of the Dremel size tooling. Also routers are not really made with long run times in mind so if you use a router for a while they tend to burn out. Usually it is the bearings that go in them. I knew a guy that went through high end Porter Cable routers like they were going out of style until he finally got a real spindle. He was happy then. Me I just couldn’t hack the noise of a router running for 45 minutes or an hour straight cutting jobs. It’s the kind of thing that got to me. It’s different if you’re using the tool yourself. But just screaming away constantly on the machine was too much for me.
@Paul_Frederick well, hopefully it won’t be for long. The seller is sending another replacement.
I have no experience, just what I read. Paul’s comments seem spot on. I was only suggesting using it to get a feel for the machine and maybe do some quick and dirty jobs while you wait for your spindle to come in.
@Kyle_Kerr I’m sure if you know it is only temporary that must help putting up with it. Routers can really sing attached to CNC machines. I think they use part of the machine as a sounding board? All I know is I didn’t think it was going to be an issue, until it was.
I still use a router. It’s deafening. Im on number two already I just set up my little sphinx with one to cut some aluminum plates for a belt grinder. It’s definitely not ideal.
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@Mark_Leino I started out using a router too. The low cost was just too tempting for me. To be fair it did the work too. But it worked me over with the noise it made at the same time. I was getting into jobs with longer run times and I just didn’t even want to run them. Because I knew I’d have to listen to the router the whole time. At that point I broke down and spent the money to buy a spindle because the router was holding me back.
@Paul_Frederick What type of spindle do you have?
After I called the sender yesterday and told them to let me know if they can’t deliver package by July 30 to let me know and I would cancel the order, I saw that UPS has scheduled delivery here between 2:45pm and 6:45pm today.
@George_Allen I have one of the black air cooled “500W” Chinese ER11 spindles. I can’t really recommend it. It is only about 100W as best as I can measure it and on top of that it does not really spin fast enough to use smaller bits in. It claims to go 13,500 RPM and even if it goes that fast it isn’t really fast enough. 20K or 30K would be better. So it is too weak and too slow in my estimation. But it is quiet. It kind of sort of works. I can imagine better though. About all it really has going for it is it is cheap. I was hoping it was going to be better than it is. But it isn’t. To be fair I did some testing with it and it will cut deeper than I’d ask it to. Still, the cut tends to be ragged due to the low RPM. I’d say if it ran faster the low power wouldn’t even be an issue. It is typical of the Chinese to make stuff just a bit less than it should be to be decent. That’s my overall impression of the spindle that I have too. If it just spun twice as fast it’d be OK. But it doesn’t so it pretty much sucks.
@Paul_Frederick well, nowadays, you can get 2 kw spindles for less than $150, but you have to have a VFD.
@George_Allen one of these days I’ll get another spindle for my machine. But that won’t be for a while. I have a lot of other things that I want to do before then.