Saturday, May 17, 2014

Project CNC - New Spindle - keep forgetting to post picture

After my last spindle failure (bearing freeze up with Harbour Freight Cutout Tool) I knew that I had to splurge and get a better quality tool.  I ended up deciding on a Porter Cable Laminate Trimmer.
PCLT 7310 with included mount
Bare PCLT 7310

It's a bit dirty in this picture but that's because I've been using it in my CNC mill.  It is single speed (30,000 rpm - with no load) but that is fine with me right now.  In the future I'll look at options for speed control.

My only issue with it has been that it only comes with a 1/4" collet (so it can only take bits/endmills with a 1/4" shank - my good endmills are all 1/8" shank).  After a lot of searching I found a company that sells a 1/8" collet for this specific tool: Elaire Corporation.  So far this collet has worked perfectly for my endmills.  For some reason I could not find mention of this collet or company on any of the CNC sites I have looked at.  Also it took looking 4-5 pages in on searches to find this company (when searching for collets for the Porter Cable Laminate Trimmer 7310).  The cost of the collet, with shipping, ended up being around $27, so the router plus the collet was close to $90 after taxes.  If I had gone with the Porter Cable Palm Router it would have been about $120 plus tax but would have included both collets.  It would be nice to know if Porter Cable uses the same specs for collet's for all their routers.

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