gritty ballscrews

[phill05]

apparently this works a lot of the time and is obviously easier than complete dis-assembly.

An hour or two spent stripping down, clean properly, and repack would in the long run save you some pain in the future.

Phill

[Voicecoil]

I'm going to try the flushing thing, I know what they should feel like when put together properly and if they don't meet that it'll be a complete strip down :-( . If nothing else, cleaning out some of the crap will make winding the nuts down to get the balls out less graunchy.

BTW, what would be the recommended oil/grease to use when re-assembling?

[AndyUK]

Hows things going with these screws? Had any luck?

If you're still looking for oil/grease recommendations, Lee gave me a great reply recently - the short version being lithium based grease - if you look at the HIWIN greasing guide, you'll also see EP1 mentioned.

http://www.mycncuk.com/threads/11552...y?goto=newpost

[Voicecoil]

Yes, Fred has been good to his word and sorted me out with some replacement bits including completely replacing the 1204 screws which had the slightly wonky end machining - you can't fault the guy's service, 10/10. Regarding the grease, looking at the specs Hiwin recommend, I've realised that I already have something that should do - Mobil 1, which I bought for re-packing the struts on the car.

[Voicecoil]

Whilst pondering ways to make a linear motion assembly thinner I pulled out one of these old ballscrews to look at, I'm the kind of guy that thinks much better with something physical in my hands. Whilst idly twiddling it and looking down the end of the nut I noticed there was a definite gap in the line of balls if you held it horizontally and rotated the screw, you could hear the balls tipping over the crown of the screw as they made their way down the other side, sometimes accompanied by a sudden roughness is the rotation force. If you held the screw upright this didn't seem to happen, presumably gravity was sorting things out. This made me think, shouldn't there be a more or less continual line of balls??? could this be why they still felt rough after quite a bit of cleaning out of swarf?? Any advice from linear motion experts would be very welcome.