CNC Ball Screw Preventive Maintenance: An Imperative to Avoid Machine Failure
What comes to mind when you hear the term “ball screw preventive maintenance” for your CNC equipment? Does it make you cringe because you fear the down time of taking your machine out of production? Do you wonder how you will make up for the lost time and money? Or do you follow a meticulous plan for ball screw preventive maintenance, so your investment in your CNC equipment lasts as long as possible?
If you fall into the former group, rest assured that CNC ball screw preventive maintenance only serves to keep your CNC equipment running at peak performance. And, while planned down time may be an inconvenience, it sure beats the costs associated with unplanned downtime. An unexpected CNC emergency that has your machine down can be quite costly in terms of part replacement. It can also be costly in terms of downtime, especially if you can’t get the right part in quickly. That is why we recommend regularly checking your CNC machine per your manufacturers recommendations, and ball screw inspection/clean & flush service by our professionals every 1-2 years.
Make ball screw PM a priority
Nearly all operators understand the importance of regularly inspecting your CNC machines. Yet sometimes, we find that customers get caught up in the day-to-day production and don’t always make inspections a priority. Take your PM and inspections seriously, and you can avoid what one customer recently experienced, when it was discovered that a ball screw had been operating with no oil line for 3-5 months. Yes, we were able to restore this beast, but a weekly inspection would have alerted the operator to the issue and prevented the line from running dry (and the damage to the ball screw assembly).
(This post originally appeared at www.cncballscrewrepair.com)
