camwood WR408 fun fun

[comandojon]

Hello all.

A little background on my machine.

I purchased a new camwood WR408 with the 3hp liquid cooled spindle from factorynew back when Tom was still with them and the router program was his pet project. At the time I was the first person to purchase one west of the Mississippi.

I had a bunch of initial issues with Z progressively going deeper while cutting nested cabinets, I added in a better ground and a new better shielded cable to supply power to the spindle.

This solved my Z problem .

Next minor issues to happen is two of the limit switches stopped working. I have yet to replace them, they are on my " list " of things to fix while the machine is down.

More minor issues related to the overall quality of the machine E-Stop switches two of them broke, various screws were missing etc.

So fast forward for the first two years it worked pretty well, other than the minor issues at the beginning it did do a good job when it worked. So in two years I used it for about 10 kitchens , and a bunch of plywood furniture frames.

I had played with carving some small stuff, and a friend asked if I would carve a large wood design in alder. Alder, not oak, not maple, not walnut. I made it through the roughing pass and the spindle stopped working. Mind you I kept an eye on the spindle temp read out, and it hit 30C 86F at the time it died.

The verdict on the spindle was it shorted out, more than likely from a lack of water flow to the spindle. Factory new informed me I would need a new one, since it was over two years old I had no warranty left on it. I couldn't stomach spending the $2400 they wanted for a new chinese spindle, so I opted for a 5HP one and new VFD from china. It was about 1k and has cut one kitchen so far.

Just putting some info out there for people who may be interested in the camwood/ excitech router.

I have some free time and plan on addressing all the other issues I am having with the machine.

A few of the things I am working on
limit switches
spindle speed control via mach3 my machine never had this
output at program end to shut off the vac pump.

[comandojon]

Just wanted to post an update on how the router is doing. Chinese eBay air cooled spindle is doing great. I have decided to use the router for dadoing and part cut out using a 1/4" compression bit at about 400 IPM. So far we have run about 100 sheets of 3/4 melamine, 50 sheets of 1/2" melamine, more than 200 sheets of 3/4 shop ply, and loads of 1/4" sheet goods ( door panels cabinet backs drawer bottoms etc. ) I gave up on using 5mm bits to do both part cut out and boring system holes. Regardless of what sales people will tell you , cutting parts out at 100 IPM is so time consuming, 5mm bits have such little cutting area that they dull in no time.

The machine is still quirky, every once in a while it will just stop in the middle of the table and show a limit switch triggered, when it is no where near one of the limits. There might be one of the switches going bad who knows, changing them
Is an inexpensive switch.

I did a quick clean up of the vacuum table this was never quite right when I bought the machine, and fixing some of the leaks etc makes cutting small parts like spreaders nailers etc. far more reliable.

Since I have sort of embraced the machine and all it's faults, I am looking at purchasing a second one with ATC to put the hardware boring back on to the machine.