“The spindle must turn” – as simple as the motto of Marco Popp, Managing Director of kptec service gmbh, sounds, there is really a lot behind it. The company repairs, overhauls and tests machine tool machining spindles. The goal of the spindle service from Schorndorf near Stuttgart, Germany, is to keep customer downtime as short as possible. When analysing and diagnosing spindles prior to disassembly, kptec uses the Portable SpindleControl (PSC) mobile spindle monitoring solution from Blum-Novotest.
A very important aspect in the field of spindle service is the inspection of installed spindles. If a company notices that a machine is no longer achieving the usual precision or that surfaces are not being machined to the required quality, kptec service must first check where the problem lies. Until now, users only had the option of inserting a measuring head into the spindle and manually recording the spindle deviations using a dial gauge. Since this measurement is done using contact and not at working speed, this is of course less meaningful in practice. In addition, the conditions on a spindle change greatly with speed and runtime. For example, the preload in the bearing assemblies varies throughout the speed range, the spindle heats up and expands – all these changes have a big impact during operation, which cannot be recorded and taken into account with manual measurements.