A spindle housing is an awkward part to clean by steam. It has machined bores, blind tapping holes, external ribs that hold chips, and — if it came straight from the machining centre — a film of cutting fluid that has started to oxidise and pick up fine aluminium swarf. Buyers who send a supplier only a part name usually get a generic machine quotation and a price that cannot be compared with anything else. The information below is what a cleaning-equipment supplier needs in order to quote something that actually clears the part in your takt time, and it is the same list you should use to compare two quotes against each other.
1. Describe the part before you describe the machine
Send the housing drawing, or a photo from two angles, together with four facts written down: base material, whether the surface is machined as-cast, machined-and-deburred, or previously painted; the presence of blind holes, threaded fittings, and seams; the largest and smallest external dimension; and whether the housing is empty or still contains chips packed in a cavity. Material and geometry decide what heat and what pressure are safe. An aluminium housing that has just come off a machining centre behaves differently from a cast-iron gearbox housing with scale and grinding dust on it.
State the soil, not just the machine that made it. A water-soluble coolant residue, a straight cutting oil, a tapping compound, a way-oil leak that ran down the outside of the housing, and adhesive grinding swarf all respond to heat differently. Oil-based soil lifts once it is heated above its pour point and released from the surface, which is where hot steam or hot water helps. Dry, cured coolant film and burnt-on lubricant need dwell time at temperature before anything is wiped or rinsed. Oxide scale, vitrified coolant crust, and packed-in grinding grit are not dissolved by heat alone; they need flushing force and mechanical action, and a supplier told only "CNC parts" may oversell or undersell the mode that matters. If your dominant soil is scale or packed grit, say so and ask directly whether steam is the right process at all.
If the housing carries surface treatments — anodising, passivation, a painted or powder-coated nameplate, a bonded seal — list them and ask the supplier in writing to confirm compatibility with high-temperature wet cleaning. Finish damage from heat and from alkaline cleaning chemistry is not reversible, and it is your cost, not the machine vendor's.
2. Fix the constraints at the station where the housing is actually cleaned
The machine type follows from the station, not from the part. Write down five numbers and give them to the supplier.
- Housings per shift, and shifts per week, including the mixed parts that share the same cleaning task.
- Measured minutes per housing for your current method, including waiting, refilling and drying — not the marketing cycle time.
- Distance from the cleaning spot to the nearest water supply and to a drain or floor channel, and whether runoff can legally go there.
- Distance from the cleaning spot to the nearest suitable power outlet, and whether a cable can cross a walkway at all.
- Aisle width, door width, thresholds, and whether the housing must be moved between the machine tool and the wash area.
Those five numbers decide between a fixed unit and a battery mobile unit. A fixed 220V steam cleaning machine such as the PowerDe HW02 is documented at 6 kW heating power, 160 °C steam temperature, 0.8 MPa vapour pressure, an 80 L SUS304 tank and a tap-water inlet. That is a strong fit when the housing is cleaned at one repeatable place near water and with a short cable route, and a poor fit when the wash spot moves around the shop or sits far from an outlet; a 6 kW cable crossing an aisle is a safety decision, not a tidiness decision.
Where the cleaning location moves, a mobile unit is usually the only workable answer. PowerDe lists driving-style and hand-pushed steam cleaning machines in versions with and without battery, which matters for your costing: the without-battery variant assumes you already have a compatible pack and a charging slot. For the hand-pushed HMW3 the detail page publishes 4.5 kW PTC heating power and a 50 L clean-water tank with a tap-water inlet. Ask for the battery runtime and charger output for whichever variant you are quoting — those figures are not published on the product page and they, not the heating power, determine how many housings one shift can cover.
3. Define acceptance before you ask for a price
Write the acceptance criteria in the same email as the enquiry, because two machines quoted against different criteria are not comparable. State the surfaces that must be clean and the surfaces that must be protected; for a spindle housing that normally means external ribs, mounting faces and the bore opening, while bearing seats, seal grooves and internal bearing surfaces stay under the machine OEM's maintenance instructions and are out of scope for steam.
Then specify the checks you will actually perform: visual inspection of rib roots and around fitting heads under raking light; a wipe test with a clean white cloth over a defined area; no visible chip bed in the largest blind pocket; and a drain-and-dry check that no water is held in an annular gap or a threaded hole before the housing moves to assembly or painting. If the housing goes on to a coating, painting or adhesive step, add a residue check for cleaning-chemistry carryover and require the supplier to tell you what rinsing step that implies. A quote that skips rinsing and drying has hidden a labour step you will pay for forever.
Do not let "sanitising" or "disinfecting" enter the specification unless it is genuinely required, and if it is, get the claim in writing together with the temperature, contact time and surface conditions it depends on. Heat and steam cleaning are not automatically a validated disinfection process, and a food-safety or healthcare requirement is judged by your own procedure and the relevant authority, not by a machine's parameter sheet.
4. The specification package to hand over
- Part drawing or photos, material, dimensions, surface treatments, and a note on blind holes and threaded fittings.
- Soil list with the actual product names — coolant brand and type, tapping compound, way oil — and whether the soil is fresh, dried, or baked on.
- Throughput: housings per shift, shifts per week, and your measured minutes per part today.
- The time window available for cleaning each shift, including refilling, changing nozzles and drying.
- Water, drainage and power situation at the station, and how runoff must be collected if there is no drain.
- Acceptance criteria and the drying requirement downstream.
- Any fixture, rack or trolley requirement, and whether parts are cleaned on a pallet, a hook or by hand.
Ask for the figures the catalogue pages do not publish, and put the request in the enquiry so every bidder answers the same question set: steam temperature and pressure measured at the nozzle rather than at the boiler, hose and wand lengths, accessory set for flat and for detailed surfaces, whether food-contact or soft-surface attachments exist, noise level, water consumption per hour, and the service interval for heating elements, seals and nozzles. A commercial steam cleaner quoted without those numbers cannot be compared with a competitor's machine on anything but price.
5. Where quotations for this job usually go wrong
Three failure patterns repeat on machine-tool cleaning enquiries. First, the bidder sizes the tank from the number of parts and ignores how long the released soil takes to wipe off; a machine with adequate heat output still loses the shift if the operator spends three minutes scraping each rib root. Second, the bidder assumes a water tap and a drain at the station, and the buyer discovers later that runoff must be mopped and bucketed because shop floor drainage is not permitted for oily water — an oily runoff question is an environmental compliance question, so settle it with your own site rules before the machine arrives. Third, the buyer specifies a mobile battery machine without checking runtime, so the shop buys a charger, a spare pack and a charging window that were never in the quotation.
For customised configurations, the same supplier that builds the machine can also be asked to fit a rack, a nozzle set for the housing geometry, or a recovery tray. PowerDe describes itself as an intelligent cleaning equipment manufacturer with customisation and engineering services, and lists customised steam cleaning equipment as a service route; use it only after your own test, not as a substitute for one.
Before you sign
- Run one housing through a single pass with the machine under consideration, at your own station, and photograph the result under raking light.
- Test on a hidden area first if the housing has a sensitive finish, and check that seams and fittings do not trap water.
- Time the whole cycle yourself — heat-up, cleaning, wiping, rinsing, drying — and use that figure, not the claimed one, in the comparison.
- Confirm what is excluded: internal bearing surfaces, seal grooves, and anything the OEM maintenance manual says must not be exposed to steam or pressure.
- Get the unpublished parameters in writing from every bidder, and put your own acceptance checklist in the purchase order.
If you want a quotation against this package, send the part photos, your housings-per-shift figure, the measured cycle time, and your water, drainage and power situation to sales@powerde.net, and ask for the nozzle-level temperature and pressure figures alongside the price.
