HF350 making unpleasant noises!!

1 hour 44 mins and nearly 33,000 lines of G Code later, I appear to have a Red Special guitar body lower section! 😮

I'm very pleased with how the Stepcraft CNC machine and its spindle performed. It can't have lost one single step. Some pics attached.

Much video footage is available but needs edited because the camera stopped recording after 30 minutes and then the battery ran out.

Now we're rockin'!

Doug

Here's an hour's worth of video footage of the milling of the lower body section of the replica Brian May Red Special guitar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlzdxmOpnp8

There are three non-contiguous parts which I had to join together because the camera is limited to 4 GB videos at a time. The total toolpath time was 1 hour 44 minutes. I think this is plenty to give you a flavour of how it all works.

Basically there's about an hour of roughing passes. I think that's pretty much all you see here so it's a bit repetitive. Then the toolpath moves to finishing passes which you don't see (parallel which moves across the X axis taking off the bottom of the pockets, waterline which goes round the outlines taking off 1.00 mm per pass and pencil cleanup which goes around the outline and takes off a little bit).

Doug

Here's 1h 45m of video footage of the milling of the upper body section of the replica Brian May Red Special guitar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wKPZwJSMw

There are some discontinuities because the camera is limited to 4 GB videos at a time. The total toolpath time was 1 hour 50 minutes comprising 9m 20s for the upper face then 1h 40m for the lower face. There is about 5 mins missing from the entire toolpath.

- StoneyCNC industrial HF spindle
- 4 mm diameter four flute solid carbide flat nosed end mill, 25 mm flute length
- Feed rate: 2,000 mm/min.
- Plunge rate: 120 mm/min.
- Rotation speed: 20,000 rpm.
- Depth per pass removed: 2.00 mm on all passes, roughing and finishing (parallel, waterline & pencil cleanup).

Doug

My HF350 is almost ready for the scrap heap!! Tried it again today more in hope than anger - more excruciating noises from the bearings!!

Reasoning that it might improve matters, I introduced some light machine oil into the collet end - this certainly got rid of the screeching noises as it ran up to speed. It still gets very hot at that end though, so the bearing(s) is undoubtedly "shot".

Any one know the strip down procedure for this spindle - it probably only wants bearings replaced as the motor seems to work fine.

I am certainly going to replace it with one of Rory's industrial grade VFD spindles - Doug is delighted with his and does some serious milling with ease now.

Peter