WM14 Mill Drill lubrication

May I ask how other owners of Warco WM14 Mill Drills lubricate the topslide slideways? I can't work out how to do it without stripping it down which is a bit drastic.

Mick

Seems to be a popular question, have read of this older thread....

**LINK**

The link to show how he did the lube grooves etc does not work for me.

Have a look at what I have done on the ZX45 mill. The Column will be next after some time in September or when I get a heavy lifting assisting device. The holes and the oil grooves can be done with hand tools, does not need to be done on another milling machine. You can use a strip of 6mm to 10mm thick strip of steel as a guide to make the grooves with some form of Dremel or other rotary tool. You can use a ball end type of stone or cutter, or use a disc wheel with a radius dressed on the corners to a 1/2 round. Anything from 3mm wide to 5mm wide will do the job nicely. If you are really good on a disc grinder, you can use that as well. But if you are new to cutting accurately with a disc grinder, maybe that is not as good a method as using smaller rotatory tools. A pistol drill or battery drill for drilling and tapping for any fittings, and in my case, is used the small pilot series 4mm counter bore to be a spot facing tool on the casting, as the threads are M5. The oil slot shape can be a wave or it can be a shallow Vee over the whole length. For the vertical slide, I am going to copy what a lot of commercial machines did and do the wavey straight line snake thing. I did not put any grooves into/onto the Gib strips or the Vee ways as of yet. I am waiting to see how wet the surface stays from the horizontal oil grooves that I put onto the XY block. When I do the Column however, It will get the wavey oil groove down the Fixed Vee and also on the gib. For the Vee sides, I intend that to be done no more than 1mm deep and no more than 3mm wide. If I can , will make the groove deeper at the top, to act like a reservoir with it ending quite shallow at the bottom, about 0.5mm deep. For the Column lube, I plan on linking the 2 sides with a single lube point.

Plan what yo want to do, and look for / buy the oil fitting /elbows/4mm tube etc before you start so that everything is ready to go at the same time. It can take some thinking through to get the oil holes connected , and it maybe on the smaller machine that you make it flow on the X and Y from one end only to flow through, instead of a centre feed going both ways. No particular way of getting oil to the slides is wrong. You may need to have a couple of external lines around the machine a bit like the DRO cables etc etc.

Neil

Story time first:

If it is my pictures - I took them off that site - I found someone using some stuff on there to help sell some specific parts for a KX1 CNC - without any acknowledgement, when asked (in person) the response was "some guy posted it on the Internet" - fair enough, but, at least he could have given me a "thanks" when I told him that it was me, all I got was a "huh" and he turned away. Oh well, I guess we all loose. (No, not Arc Eurotrade, just FYI)

Ok:

There's lots of people doing this for CNCing mills like ours. I used a straight (non-ball) end mill, as that's what my KX1 has. lightly scraped the edges of the grooves to remove burrs. I also just used pushbutton oilers, ordered from Arc (usual disclaimer).

You want the "facing up" surfaces to have a groove in them. Some zig-zag about, me, I just cut a straight groove down the middle, with 3 cross grooves (one each end, one in the middle). Drill a hole in the side of the casting for the oil pushbutton, and cross-drill down from a groove to intersect this oil-pushbutton hole. This is exactly like my KX1, so I'm not pretending to be a brainiac here.

I congratulate Neil on his efforts; there's many ways to skin a cat; I did it quickly and simply, he did it properly!

Now, all I have to do is to get off this d**n computer (and, stop paid work again) and get downstairs and use the machines!