Water cooled Chinese Spindle - air leak

[analogman]

yep I was thinking exactly that last night when I put it together. Now that I have it running at lower pressure, I can be a little more gentle with those fittings. I think thats what my problem was.

[stevespo]

I'm running a low cost, low pressure cooler as well. 5 gallon bucket, $12 (190 GPH) pump from Harbor Freight, and 50 ft of tubing (1/4" OD?). It's pretty small diameter stuff. I measured the flow and found it was only doing about 8 gal/hour. Somewhere I saw a recommendation for 20 gal/hour, but the spindle never seems to get warmer than about 72 degrees F. That includes some 2 hour jobs, but light cuts.

Steve

[wentzele]

So I too have one of these spindles. 1.5kw little smaller. Works great. I heard somewhere that thought people were running these things to cool and the bearings were getting damaged. I know air cooled spindles have a warm up period and expect you to let it heat up to about 105 F before using, overwise you will take out the bearings.

Can I assume the same should be true with the water cooled? I have a heater in a one gallon tank and leave a small pump running all the time. The spindle stays at 93 F and ready to go all the time without a warm up. I am not cutting heavy loads but the temp does rise to about 103F after a couple of hours.

Do you have info on what they should run at?