?Thanks all for the feedback.
The parts are from Automation Direct. My constraint was that I didn't want to exceed the existing footprint of the saw with a big VFD enclosure, and the logical place to mount it was under the motor. That limited me to about a 10" wide x 6" deep box. I ended up using a 10x10x6, but if I could do it again, I would get a 10x14x6 or so - that extra couple inches would have made cramming all the stuff inside a lot easier.
I used a Weg 3HP VFD (my saw is 2HP, so I upsized in case I ever replace the motor) which is pretty compact. My shop is in my house and I have trouble with VFDs tripping my arc-fault breakers, so I put in an input EMI filter to keep the saw from causing problems in my house. The enclosure also has a 25A disconnect switch, a pilot light, and a 12v power supply. I wanted to do remote speed control and programming, so I opted for the remote display, which is what required the 12v supply.
The controls are 22m buttons from Automation Direct. These are pretty cookie-cutter parts. The VFD is setup to run in a 3-wire mode with a normally open start switch going to one digital input and a normally closed stop switch going to another one. The knob on my control panel controls the speed from about 3Hz to 66Hz, which gives me a range of very slow for setting blade tracking up to about 5000fpm if I overspeed my 900RPM motor slightly (slightly meaning 10% to about 1000RPM).
The enclosure was heavily modified to get all the stuff in plus cooling. I have a Bridgeport that I did most of the drilling and cutting on, however I confess I cut a couple corners in the interest of time and due to the awkwardness of clamping something as wobbly and large as this box, so the rear louver cutout and the drilled cooling hole pattern on the bottom aren't exactly machinery-tolerance.
The airflow of the VFD is bottom to top. I don't like top-mounted vents, so I drilled a bunch of intake holes at the bottom of the enclosure and the air exits the louvered vent out the back.
Most of the disconnect switches like this use remote handles and are shaft driven. I mounted the disconnect itself where it had to go in the box and then carefully measured where to drill the door for the handle.
To mount the user controls I got a piece of steel plate and drilled through the back of the saw housing. The blade guard slides up and down on the side, so I couldn't mount it there. The user control box is a 6x6x4 Hubbell-Weigmann enclosure. I made a custom faceplate for the buttons and VFD screen and had to hog out two sides of the 6x6 box to get stuff to fit, but I'm happy with how that turned out.
For some reason my saw had a strange slot milled perpendicular to the blade. Northfield has no idea what that was for and is sure they didn't do it. I machined an aluminum slug to fill that in.
If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to provide a BOM of what I used.
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