Broken ballscrew ball? OmioCNC X6-2200L machine

[Gary]

A ballnut once assembled should never drop a ball unless a ball return pops out.
If this happens, balls will be all over the floor.
The cheap ballnuts will have plastic ball returns and these are more prone to this but will normally only happen if you put them under excessive load.
Lee is right, the Chinese ballnuts can come full of shit, (Literally) but the amount of balls is dependant on a number of things like lead, ballsize and BCD, so different ballscrew manufactures use different ballsizes and BCD, so without knowing the manufacture of the ballscrew you are pissing in the wind to get a matched ballnut.
Luckily most of the chinese ballnut manufactures buy all of TBI out of spec screws and pack the nuts to suit, so even if you were to get a new nut to fit the screw, there is a good chance it wont fit well anyway and could be too loose or too tight.
the out of spec screws will normally be not making C7 or in most cases have a slightness under or oversized BCD.
Most of the 1605 ballnuts have 3.175mm balls, but in all cases they will either be slightly under or oversized to suite the screw.

Agreed, here is a snippet of my PM for anyone with similar nut issues:

QUOTE:
Unfortunately it is quite common for these nuts to leave the factory (china) contaminated internally, I've seen and repaired everything from bits of dried out grass/straw, missing balls, misaligned returns and more commonly bits of metal swaf/chips.

Really your machine builder should of checked for this before assembly, anyway it's common on the forum now to advise anyone buying a screw and nut combo to strip it down and check the nut before use to be sure everything is good. Doing this isn't really hard to do as soon as you take the nut off the screw the balls will fallout and bounce all over the workshop, unless your paying attention!

Where people struggle is the repacking and loading of the balls back into the nut, providing you take your time, apply a little patience, a little finesse and can hold a small set of tweezers steady you should be able to do it. It dose sound like quite a corse sound on the video, it can't be ruled out that a ball bearing hasn't collapsed but to be fair I've never seen this to date, though this could just be my experience.

It sounds to me like a ball has gone off course and ended up in an area of the nut their not supposed to be in, this happens when one of the plastic returns becomes damaged or is inserted incorrectly, crap in the nut can assist in this and escalate the problem.

I would suggest stripping the screw down off the machine and seeing what you can find in the nut, as I say the worse you can come off is finding it tricky to reassemble the nut. If that happens and you can't do it, give me a shout and I can do it for you, I carry spare balls in the right sizes, for the different size nuts and a few spare parts.

A 16mm nut should have a total of 51 balls, 17 per track/return and the ball size is normally 1/8th (3.17mm) in size.
:END QUOTE

The offer of help is there to anyone who needs it, just give me a shout :)

.Me