In my talking with Tormach, I asked about a spindle break-in procedure. They told me it should have already been done, but it wouldn’t harm anything to do it again. They suggested running it in 1000RPM increments, and measuring the spindle temperature with a non-contact IR thermometer. Once the temperature stabilized at a particular speed, bump it up to the next one.

I figured I’d one-up it a bit and get some IR imagery while I was at it, as well as get thermocouple data off of the stationary part of the spindle nose. Here is my test setup. It’s just a multimeter with a temperature probe, and a Flir i7 handheld IR camera I borrowed from the lab at work.

I collected IR images and data at each speed level and did some charting and graphing during the break-in process.

Who doesn’t love data?

2013DEC12
time        elapsed   speed    IR temp (F)   contact temp (F)
07:06:00PM  00:00     0        49.1          55
07:38:00PM  00:32     1000     79.8          67
07:47:00PM  00:09     2000     94.7          72
07:59:00PM  00:12     3000     90.9          74
08:09:00PM  00:10     4000     97.1          77
08:16:00PM  00:07     5000     113.6         84
08:27:00PM  00:11     6000     133.8         95
08:49:00PM  00:22     7000     191.1         128
09:02:00PM  00:13     8000     198.8         134
09:07:00PM  00:05     9000     192.4         131
09:11:00PM  00:04     10000    181.8         127