Cooling a water cooled spindle, without pipes everywhere & huge water tanks/buckets!

As it's in your dining room why not pump it through a wall mounted central heating radiator, nobody would notice it and it would heat the room in winter.

I'd guess a 2.2kw spindle will produce far less than 500W heat, as electic motors are 90%+ efficient, and the bearing friction won't contribute that much to heat.
Personally, I'd opt for a copper coil. Get a coil of 8 or 10mm copper pipe, make some holders to space and secure it (basically some bits of MDF/Plywood notched out to accept the pipe) and pipe it up. You'll still need some kind of tank to allow for expansion though.

I certainly wouldn't be using a car radiator, as they're designed to deal with 10's of KW of heat. A heater matrix would be more suitable, but it's quite hard to get them with basic pipe connections, and it's not worth scrapyards removing them as they take that long to get into.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by silyavski

Hi,
in fact i did just the same at the beginning. It will heat and eventually break. I had a Mercedes screenwash water tank and VDO brand pump. I fixed a PC cooler fan on the pump and run it at 6v. One day it broke. It heated a lot and made a lot of noise.

Its up to you but if you go to a local pet store for 20eur you can have a perfect 1000lph pump, if you dont want spending 32euro on the ebay one/3000lph/.

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What power spindle was that with? Mine is 800W.

I'm actually leaning more towards using the separate pump and container as I'm not really that convinced the screenwash pump will last very long. I had a brainwave today on the tank. I've got a tall small footprint plastic food container that could be a good tank and I can make some bulkhead mounting pipe fittings using hosetail connectors and a nut and washer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by richie00boy

What power spindle was that with? Mine is 800W.

I'm actually leaning more towards using the separate pump and container as I'm not really that convinced the screenwash pump will last very long. I had a brainwave today on the tank. I've got a tall small footprint plastic food container that could be a good tank and I can make some bulkhead mounting pipe fittings using hosetail connectors and a nut and washer.

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Hi,
My spindle is 800w. Thats what i am telling you, the screenwash pump will not last even if coooled by pc fan and makes a lot of noise, plus you need a 2-3A power supply at least to run it. Will not run with a smaller than 1A.

Here is a picture of my setup. Note that at the picture is not seen but now i have a bar which is fixed to the spindle and holds together the cable and the housing straight vertical, to avoid twisting of the cable and the hose. As this bloody chinese spindle cable connection was giving me problems:

Attachment 9971

Ok ...water pumps.

it seems the plastic tubing spec for the water cooled spindle is 8mm OD & 5mm ID ...but most of the water pumps on Ebay seem to have nothing of the sort...so is everyone using water pumps with reducers/adapters?

If you are only cutting/drilling pcb and other soft materials. do you even need to bother with cooling? I have been running my wc spindle without cooling for about 10 years now and have never felt the spindle get hotter than hand warm. Obviously if I was doing very long runs cutting hard materials I would keep checking it did not overheat, but to date I have never had need to water cool. G.

Dunno...never had one. I just assumed the fact that they were called water cooled spindles meant you had to water cool 'em!

I'll probably be running jobs for about 45mins to 1 hour max ....but for the sake of a pump & a bucket I think I'd rather err on the side of caution (my machine already has the plastic tubing installed into its loom, so I only need to add a pump & I'm off to the races - but like I say...which pump, which outlets!)

My pump has 8mm connections and I was assuming/hoping that the 6mm tubing would stretch enough to go on...