Tor­mach Speed­ers will be avail­able for sale this week on tormach.com. I inter­viewed Matt for a quick youtube clip on the Speeder basics.

Here are a few answers to some other ques­tions we have received over that last few months.

Q: Can the Speeder do 30k RPM?
A: Yes, but real­ize there will be trade­offs with belt, and most likely spin­dle bear­ing life. How­ever, both belts and spin­dle car­tridges are stocked indi­vid­u­ally as replace­ment parts. We’ve rated the speeder for con­tin­u­ous oper­a­tion at 20k RPM.

Q: What is the exact pul­ley ratio?
A: 1:3.2. If you need to know RPMs exactly, the true test is an opti­cal tachome­ter. You’ll have slight RPM losses from fric­tion, etc. — so the best way is to mea­sure what you really have is with the tach.

Q: Can I use Coolant?
A: Yes, but be aware of cer­tain restric­tions. The lower spin­dle is sealed against coolant using a labyrinth seal which means that spin­dle rota­tion is required for seal­ing action. Best prac­tice is to turn coolant on only after the spin­dle is spin­ning and turn coolant off before the spin­dle is turned off. This should be a stan­dard pro­ce­dure with any high speed spin­dle. The upper sec­tions, where the belt drive trans­mis­sion exists, should not be exposed to coolant.

In the video, Matt men­tions that we dynam­i­cally bal­ance the ER16 col­let nut, and that reminded me about some­thing we did dur­ing the ini­tal spin­dle bal­ance cal­cu­la­tions. We were inter­ested in esti­mat­ing how far the cen­ter of mass is off­set from the cen­ter­line of the ER nut as result of the nut’s inher­ently imbal­anced design. CNC Scan­ner made that really easy to fig­ure out. Our esti­mate deter­mined that the con­tri­bu­tion to imbal­ance wasn’t insignif­i­cant. Based on that, we ended up get­ting a few nuts bal­anced for test­ing in the lab, and ulti­mately decid­ing to make bal­anced nuts stan­dard with the product.

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