CNC Ball Screw Preventative Maintenance

What comes to mind when you hear the term “preventive maintenance” for your CNC equipment? Does it make you cringe because you fear the down time of taking your machine out of production? Do you wonder how you will make up for the lost time and money? Or do you follow a meticulous plan for PM so your investment in your CNC equipment lasts as long as possible?

If you fall into the former group, rest assured that CNC ball screw preventative maintenance only serves to keep your CNC equipment running at peak performance, and while planned down time may be an inconvenience, it sure beats the costs associated with unplanned downtime. An unexpected CNC emergency that has your machine down can be quite costly in terms of part replacement, not to mention time consuming if you can’t get the right part in quickly. That is why we recommend regularly checking your CNC machine per your manufacturers recommendations, and ball screw inspection/clean & flush service by our professionals every 1-2 years.

Nearly all operators understand the importance of regularly inspecting your CNC machines, yet sometimes we find that customers get caught up in the day-to-day production and don’t always make CNC ball screw preventative maintenance a priority. Take your PM and inspections seriously, and you can avoid what one customer recently experienced, when it was discovered that a ball screw had been operating with no oil line for 3-5 months. Yes, we were able to restore this beast, but a weekly inspection would have alerted the operator to the issue and prevented the line from running dry (and the damage to the ball screw assembly).