Blew out a spindle bearing on a Haas mini mill yesterday

I always thought I could push feeds and speeds to the max since the machine could handle it. Turns out running a 1/2 end mill at 12,000 RPM with a heavy chipload for 4 hours straight was a bad idea. The bearing seized up around 3pm and I heard a grinding noise that made my stomach drop. I had to stop the job, call the tooling rep, and order a replacement spindle that cost me $2,800. My boss told me "you gotta respect the machine limits" and now I'm backing off by 20% on roughing passes. Has anyone else cooked a spindle by getting too aggressive?

2 comments

2 Comments

dakota_singh3925d ago

Nah, if the machine couldn't take it, that's Haas's fault for selling a weak spindle.

lopez.brooke25d ago

Three hours of setup and one bad cut. That's what we're talking about here. @dakota_singh39 you're acting like Haas sells magic indestructible spindles. They don't. I've seen a Haas spindle eat itself on a .005 doc in aluminum. Customer didn't even crash it. Just a bad bearing from the factory. So blaming the operator for trusting the machine is backwards. You're basically saying "don't use the machine the way it was designed." That's like buying a pickup truck and getting mad when someone puts a bag of mulch in the bed. Yeah, the operator went hard on it. But if the spindle can't handle a 1/2 inch rougher with a reasonable cut, that's not a $60k machine. That's a glorified drill press. Haas builds entry level machines and prices them that way. But they shouldn't fall apart doing basic work. Period.

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