Manual Oiler Position - Gets Very Messy

[philbur]

On my series 1 machine the manual oiler is attached to the left side of the machine base. It gets very messy down there and is difficult to clean with all the nooks and crannies. After 5 years it only occurred to me yesterday while cleaning the machine for the umpteenth time: why don't I move it, for example to the left side of the column, half way up.

Has anybody done it and/or have any comments?

Where's the manual oiler located on the series 2 and 3?

Phil

[TXFred]

It's in the same place. But I see no reason why you couldn't move it.

In fact, putting it higher would probably improve oil flow to the Z axis.

Frederic

[zephyr9900]

Phil, every time I clean chips off the machine I think about it. The minimum effort would be to put 3/8"or 10mm spacers behind the unit and use 3 longer fixing screws, which would eliminate the crevice/pocket where the chips accumulate and let them fall through.

I have thought about putting a remote reservoir up on the column, but never thought about moving the lubricator itself up there. I don't think there are any check valves in the system, which would potentially let the way oil drain through if elevated, but then I also know that the oil is pumped through orifices which would probably slow the gravity flow enormously (but given the oil is a viscous liquid it would eventually drain out anyway...)

Tormach places the power lubricator even lower, outside the drip pans and down on the stand, so it is pumping even more uphill.

I did look up the lubrication pump on the manufacturer's website, and discovered that it is just a single-shot piston pump that is embedded in a small reservoir. There are fittings and tubing available that would let me take the pump out of the reservoir, replace the inlet screen with a length of tubing, and plumb a remote, large reservoir that I could pour 2-4 liters of oil into at a time. I'm attaching a drawing of the pump, and another where I used a raster-to-vector program to digitize the bare pump and pump in reservoir and then overlay them, FWIW.

Randy

[TXFred]

I have thought about putting a remote reservoir up on the column, but never thought about moving the lubricator itself up there. I don't think there are any check valves in the system, which would potentially let the way oil drain through if elevated, but then I also know that the oil is pumped through orifices which would probably slow the gravity flow enormously (but given the oil is a viscous liquid it would eventually drain out anyway...)

You raise a good point. The oil will tend to siphon itself out, so it will drain the entire system. But will that take days, weeks, or months? I have no idea, but I have this image of going on vacation and coming back to find that a gallon of machine oil has flowed into a coolant tank that only had a quart of ullage. That would be messy.

Maybe a better idea would be to bring the oil line through a bulkhead fitting in the chip pan, and mount the coolant pump outside of the chip pan where it can stay clean. If you give it a remote reservoir, then there's less need to keep the top of the pump accessible. So you could even hang it underneath the chip pan.

Frederic

P.S. Obscure words are fun!