Rong-Fu 45 Benchtop Mill Spindle Wrench Prototype · Sep 10, 18:33
If you have a benchtop mill of the Rong-Fu or clone variety – whether it’s a belt drive or gear drive – you’ll find that the lack of a spindle wrench makes torquing down tooling difficult.
We’ve prototyped a spindle wrench on our CNC mill out of a 2” wide 3/8” thick aluminum extrusion. Turns out that you can simply make this by drilling a through hole (or boring one out in the center) and then making three slots for the “fingers”). But after drafting up the sketch in a program like Autodesk Inventor, PTC ProEngineer Wildfire 3.0, Solidworks, or a host of other programs and then using a program like Mastercam to generate the G-Code, it took a few minutes to crank out the following part:
Here’s the raw stock being CNC milled:
And the test fit. Works just fine!
We’ll post plans for this after we work out some design features and put it through its paces. Using a relatively soft material like aluminum, brass, etc. eliminates the risk of damaging the splines on the spindle.
Enjoy!
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