phunk

ya we are currently working on replacing the spindle drive on the CNC we use for automotive parts (our other CNC is pretty much dedicated to injection mold building, we rarely have any down time with it to run car parts or prototypes).

for months we have had a problem where the spindle would fault when braking for a tool change, it was no big deal when it happened because it wasnt all that frequent and all it meant was reseting the spindle drive and rerunning the part.. so just 10-15 min wasted when it happened. But satuday it got worse. Twice the spindle drive faulted in the middle of cutting... and to loose spindle power while running a 1" cutter a half inch deep in aluminum means expensive tooling getting sheared right off. so now we can not run the machine at all because its at risk of destroying a tool every time it faults, and its faulting left and right all of a sudden. we went through the entire spindle and motor and encoder setup today and everything looks great so tomorrow we have to get a replacement spindle drive on the way... should only take a day or two to get here and a hour or two to swap out. if that gets us back online we can continue cutting parts.

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