I have been getting my shop prepped for the 4x8 AltMill and ATC spindle I have on order and have run into a dilemma. I have three dedicated circuits ready 220v 30a for the spindle, 120 20a for the controller, and 120 20a for my dust collection.
The plan for the ATC was to run my Cali Air 8010 1hp 8 gal on the same 20a circuit as my dust collection. Together they only pull 15a so I thought I was good. However the website says ATC needs:
A reasonable sized air compressor, with 3 CFM at 90psi or better, and 100psi minimum
My current compressor does 2.20 CFM @ 90 PSI and upgrading to a 2hp compressor means I will need another dedicated circuit.
The cheap solution I think is to add an auxiliary tank to the compressor considering the ATC is just using pressure intermittently for tool changes. IDK maybe it is time to add another circuit for a larger compressor.
I don’t (yet) have a tool changer so take the following with several grains of salt …
A 1 HP air compressor should be plenty of capacity. I would not worry about any changes until I had tested the compressor already at hand. My next step would be to expand air storage as you had mentioned.
The real test would be to see how long the compressor runs under normal/average conditions. Hopefully your compressor manual will give you a duty cycle rating and only if I exceed this specification would I worry about upgrading. If your manual does not specify a duty cycle, I would think that a 20% duty cycle would be safe.
As you say, air is only required intermittently …..
Yea my 1hp Cali Air compressor has a 70/30 duty cycle. It can go from 0 to 125psi in 2min. I think going from 8 gal to 20 gal with a second tank is a good sub $100 fix. I did message the guys at Sienci so maybe they can shed some more light on the air requirements of the spindle.
The engineering guys at Sienci responded to my question. They wrote this:
“I’m 95% sure his setup is good enough. We wrote the specification this way because 3CFM @ 90psi seems to be the rating for most pancake compressor that people can find in a hardware store (your Husky, Ryobi, etc. etc.), and we want people to know that they need something that class or above. Cali-Air is a bit special in that their products don’t really follow that convention, so even if their motor is smaller, the guts it has is almost certainly sufficient to power this. And yes, the spindle only consume an appreciable amount of air when it is tool changing.
Our plan is to buy a few of Cali Air’s products to test in house over the coming few weeks, he can stay tuned for that, but in any case I would really hold off on any compressor upgrades.
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