Spindle Nose Cone

[chodges]

Does anyone know where I can buy a spring-loaded nose cone that I can chuck into my 4hp HSD spindle on my PRS Alpha? I believe I have an ER25 collet.

Thanks!

[knight_toolworks]

I can see one on a model rocket but I have no clue what you would do with one on your cnc machine. want to enlighten me?

[chodges]

We are a sign company. Each of our 3 engraving machines has a belt-driven spindle with a spring-loaded nose cone just below the collet that holds 6" long 1/4" shank engraving cutters, which resemble router bits.

Our engraving machines are much smaller than our Shopbot and, like our Shopbot, each engraving machine has a gantry that rides on rails (using lead screws) to move the cutter.

Our largest engraving machine can accept material 24" wide without getting in the way of the gantry. This means we can engrave material up to 24" wide x any length.

Occasionally, we need to engrave larger pieces, and we would like to use our Shopbot to do that.

Unfortunately, we have no way to precisely control the depth of cut (we use 2-ply engraving stock with a .015" thick face color) without using a spring-loaded nose cone to compensate for minor variations in the accuracy of our Shopbot table top and the lack of perfect flatness of large sheet goods.

On our engraving machines, the spring-loaded nose cone solves this problem by allowing the depth of the cutter to adjust itself on the fly according to variations in the material plane encountered as the material is being engraved.

[knight_toolworks]

thats what I thought you were after but I wanted to make sure.
here you go but hold on to your wallet.
http://www.2linc.com/engraving_products.htm
I have one and it works work. but so far I have only used it as a drag tip. You will want the depthstop nose.

[chodges]

That's really close to what I want - thanks!

Since we sometimes need to remove the background of large pieces (leaving the lettering & border proud), I need to find something similar to the one you pointed me to that can utilize a 1/2" diameter bit. It would just take forever to remove the background on a 48" x 96" piece of material using a 1/4" bit (the maximum size accepted by the one you found).

Thank you VERY much!

[knight_toolworks]

thats all there is this is the only company that makes them. I don't think the design would hold up to larger bits anyway. well for what your doing it would not be bad but still they are the only ones.