hello, again another post of mine that I'm not sure is going to be of interest to anyone but here goes my cheap *** solution/experiment to an automatic oil lubrication pump setup. Simply a fridge compressor and a fish tank airline splitter, works brilliantly. Even shuts it's self of after pumping an inch or so of oil through the pipes and repeats after 2mins, think it's some sort of protection built into these things. I find one pump is enough 10w30 to lubricate the machine for upto 6 hours of run time so just a case of flicking the switch or I suppose this could be done with a macro to be fully automated. The compressor itself needs to be a small one, the smaller the better. The larger ones seem don't have the torque to pump the larger piston capacity of the heavier than designed for 10w30 oil. It has been working now for a week, 2-3 times a day, it seems very consistent in the volume it pumps and at a good pressure too. Originally I left the ball bearings in the nipples and the pump have enough pressure to open them, however I had one that opened easier than the rest so most of the oil went to one component so instead I drilled them out and used the pig (airline splitter) to control how much oil goes into each feed pipe. Once in the pipe gravity still seems to feed the oil into the bearing over time which is ideal. In the past I've tried gravity alone and found that it would often block. With this compressor which is capable of a good few hundred psi for a very short period, i don't seem to get blockages anymore as with the feed pipe empty, it must blow them out as it fills Entire setup set me back just shy of £20
What nuts/ linear bearings and carriages are you running? Do you have metal on metal moving parts? All of which do really require lubrication, if they have nipples they require either grease or oil, lithium/ fast white grease if none of the bearings are subjected to dust or oil if in a dusty environment. They will wear quick without it. Even rack and pinions require lubrication, some machines have pinions with oil holes that do this automatically, I'm in the process of setting up another smaller pinion that I will drip oil onto that meshes and applies oil to the primary pinion. With lighter machines the wear won't happen as quickly but wherever metal is running on metal your going to get wear, oil just slows it down, makes a hell of a difrence to the smoothness of the machine too. I'd say pretty much all commercial woodworking machines have oil reservoirs of one sort or other. I have 6 hiwin carriages, will be 8 when I get around to swapping out the round rail in the z, 2 ballscrews, 2 round rail linear bearings and two r&p's so as you can imagine oiling all of these two times a day is a pain so hense why I needed a quicker solution.
