Been a long time since I posted. Have been very busy. I wanted to put a question in front of you folks. The bearings went out on the upper rollers for the y axis on our table. After looking at the potential work involved with replacing the bearings per OEM, I decided to “upgrade” to a more user friendly method than disassembly of the gantry. After carefully cutting out the existing roller axles I machined an axle that can be installed from the out side of the gantry plate instead of having to disassemble the entire y drive assembly. To cut out and replace initially it took about an hour to do. In the future we can now replace y axis bearings in less than 5 minutes. I was curious if there might be enough interest in this mod for me to make up a batch of these axles. I will get a couple of pics tomorrow. But in essence after removing original axles with a cut off wheel and unscrewing. The axle I made is turned from a grade 8 3/8 bolt. I remove the head, turn down part of the shank to fit the roller bearings, then add 1/4 20 threads to the end for a nut to capture the roller. The other end is left with the 3/8’s thread and slotted at the very end so it can be adjusted with a flat head screw driver. This is super handy because you can fine tune the rollers very precisely. Since we purchased this table it was never capable of running at 400 ipm. Without binding. After some minor adjustments of roller offset we can run the table at 400 ipm with zero problems. Also of note, anytime we lost steps due to any issues we always would bring gantry to end of table to re/ align the gantry by hard stopping at extreme range of motion. Upon checking squareness of cut we determined that the gantry was misaligned when coming to the hard stops at y zero. So I also added adjustable stops on y0 end of table to fine tune the x direction when zeroing at y zero to the adjustable hard limits.
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