I just gave my Shapeoko 5 Pro a good cleaning and lubrication and wanted to summarize some tidbits and observations. I will mostly describe what I did. Be sure to refer to the Carbide3D official documentation for additional information. You may want to refer to Winston’s YouTube video on Shapeoko Linear Rail lubrication. It was quite good.
Items needed (my recommendation):
- Mobil Vactra #2 Way Oil
- 2.5 mm Allen wrench (Allen key) for the oil port screws.
- 1 ml syringe with Luer Slip Tip. You can use a 3-4 ml size, but I found the smaller 1ml size provided better clearances and ease of measurement. You do NOT want the syringe with the needle nor the Luer Lock tip. The Luer Slip Tip fits the oil ports perfectly. These are available on Amazon for about $5.00 for 20, so you will have them forever.
- Q-tips and cleaning rags.
There are 12 HG-15 linear bearings on the 5 Pro. Four of them are on each axis.
Start by cleaning off the machine. Then clean the rails (I used q-tips first to get in the upper and lower grooves. Then I use a soft rag to clean the entire set of rails and ball screws.
Adjust the machine to access the 12 oil port screws. These are M4 by 5mm pan head or grub screws. You will need a 2.5 mm allen wrench to remove them. Using Carbide Motion I moved the machine to the front center position with the z-axis all the way up. I did power down the machine at this point for safety.
I started with the x-axis and removed the 4 screws one at a time … they do like to fall at times when putting them back in and I wanted to be sure to keep track of them, hence the one at a time. I then did the upper z-axis bearing ports with the two screws accessible from the top. Following this I did the two bottom screw ports on the lower bearings. Finally, I gently pushed the z-axis head slowly back to the rear 4 inches to be able to reach the front and rear facing 2 bearing port screws on each side of the machine for the y-axis.
As each screw was removed, I injected about .5ml of the oil into each port by gently pressing the tip of the syringe into the port hole and pressing the plunger. I only sucked in .5 ml of oil at a time to keep it simple. One plunger press per hole. After each oiling, I reinserted the screw and tightened GENTLY. You do not want to over-tighten the screws.
Note on the lower z-axis ports … the syringe when properly inserted did NOT leak any oil. I was able to inject .5 ml of oil into the bottom oil ports and re-insert the screws without ANY leakage. I did NOT find it necessary to remove the z-axis.
Once competed I wiped down the rails and grooves with additional oil (lightly) and put a little on the ball screws. I ran the machine to distribute the oil. (I first moved each axis slightly to wipe down and oil the rail pieces that were covered by the mechanisms).
I was very pleased on how easy the lubrication went with the syringe — especially the lower z-axis ports.
The biggest take-away I can suggest is the use a syringe for the lubrication. It made the entire process less stressful and ensued that the right amount of oil went directly into the bearings without leakage — ESPECIALLY for the z-axis!
George
I missed that you mentioned it, and I actually haven’t watched any Shapeoko videos. I’m just getting to the point where I want to relube my N4, which does share motion hardware with a recent Shapeoko…