So I crashed my spindle into my work piece five days ago. Over the weekend I went over everything, replaced 2 v wheels, tightened all the eccentric nuts, recalibrated the belt stretch, and all seemed to be good.
Cut a few parts on Monday, and randomly, on some plunges I would hear a clunk.
Last night I was trying out my new laser and heard a THUD, my spindle dropped and the laser hit the ground. The two screws on the nut for the ball screw had backed out.
Now I have a bunch of tiny ball bearings that fell out of the slider blocks. I’m sure that a few are missing. Found one bearing 10’ away with a magnet.
Call support, those linear bearings are not the easiest thing to re-pack and they need to be clean too.
If you can still turn the ballscrew by hand and it’s smooth and the ballnut goes up and down then things should be OK with that, looks like it’s just vibration loosening the bolts.
And I’m off to see the ballscrew bolts with some loctite too…
Back in Business! C3D fixed me up with new glide blocks and got it back to me this past week. Got it installed and trammed today. Will be back to cutting tomorrow.
I found mine and checked they were tight after seeing your post.
Added to my maintenance check list now.
@Julien Does your e-book have a “service items on the HDZ” section planned? This would be a good one, along with how to grease the linear rail slides when you get to 100km…
Here you go, here’s some phone pics of the deep dark hole in the HDZ, a couple from outside for context too, with included Allen key for checking the bolts are tight.
BTW, is it just me or is anyone else surprised by the remarkably decent quality of the allen keys included in the Shapeoko kits compared to the normal press-stamped out of cheese junk you normally get as “free tools” ?
Thanks !
Added them to a nascent “HDZ maintenance” section.
Would you mind sharing your tips for that “100km linear rail greasing” ? I confess to never doing it, but I should.
I seem to remember that you came up with a nice maintenance checklist over time, if you wiould like to contribute some of that to the “Troubleshooting & maintenance” chapter in the ebook, I’m all ears.
I’ll be finding out more about the rail lubrication as I do the install for mine, been reading the HiWin docs. One thing you do get with the HiWin rail blocks is the grease nipples for getting the new lube into the blocks. This seems to be a key part of keeping dirt out, the lube slowly flowing through the seals and coating the rails forms the small particle sealing.
Here’s the tiny little grease nipples that came with my rail blocks;
