I recently had a project go wrong because of my ball nut getting clogged in the gantry block. Thankfully this forum had some information on how to fix it myself before having to contact Onefinity. I made a video to hopefully help anyone out there that runs into the same problem as me.
Lesson learned: Use dust collection and clean out the ball nuts every few months. I shoot a lot of videos for youtube and instagram so I often take my dust boot off to shoot a time lapse- this sends a lot of dust on the ball screw that ends up getting packed into the ball nut. Thankfully its a very easy fix.
Wondering if Onefinity will eventually come out with some simple wipers or whisker biscuits to put on the openings of the gantry blocks to help keep this issue in check.
By the way, I don’t think the wipers will allow to continue to spread around wood dust without consequences. Wood dust tends to mix with oil and creep into everything where oil is wanted and used, strongly disturbing up to destroying mechanics, as seen here and here. Wood dust is generally incompatible with oiled mechanics. Either you have a powerful dust collection, or you seal your mechanics (e.g. by putting them into convoluted rubber gaiters).
Now that might be a helpful upgrade, especially if dust-caused -seizures are a common issue. I suppose we’d lose a bit of travel, and it might interfere with using stalling as a means to finding home.
My wipers are stuck and I can’t seem to get them to move without stripping the ribs. Any suggestions on which tool to try that won’t damage the ribs? I know you used a razor blade and Onefinity guys used the end of a hex key. I tried both with no luck. Sprayed some lube on both of them and let it sit for awhile but still no luck getting them to move.
I’ve been cutting lots of eps foam as well and have had a few issues with foam moving past wipers and seals into things like the lower z bearing, z sliders, y axis ball screw, etc. The “nice” thing about eps foam is that it dissolves with most solvents and even many oils like WD-40. I’ve been able to clear most of my problems with solvent and lubrication. I’ve become obsessed with dust removal to keep these areas as free from foam grit as possible.
Has anyone tried to put a small dc voltage on their machine to repel dust statically?
