Hi All,
Recently got my hands on a year 2000 Arrow 1250. As it turns out, the machine has seen better days since the carriage on the Y-Axis linear rail is shedding ball bearings at an extraordinary rate. I've priced the rails and decided to move forward with replacing them.
Before plunging in, however, I thought I might ping the community to see if anyone has had similar experiences and whether anyone could offer up some tips and tricks to make this process go smoothly. I plan to photo-document the process so as to provide a good reference for others in the future.
I've been coming up with a procedure and it appears the whole y-axis saddle must be taken off to perform this feat. This requires the disconnect of the reader head from the glass scale. Does anyone have any advice on how best to do this without inducing an alignment nightmare upon reassembly? Studying the parts manual, and upon visual inspection, there appears to be a steel block bolted to the carriage which the reader head mounts to. Removing the head should be straight forward, however, there are no locating datums to mount it back...
Additionally, this will involve disconnecting the y-axis ball screw. Since it appears to be fed through the casting, with the ball nut captured, I would assume that undoing the ball nut, sliding the carriage forward into the over travel condition will clear the screw and allow for the carriage to in turn be picked straight off the bed. Assuming the above is correct, might there be issues with re-orienting the y-axis motor to table location as with the spindle belts and tool change orient etc?
As always, any thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.
All the best,
ih
Recently got my hands on a year 2000 Arrow 1250. As it turns out, the machine has seen better days since the carriage on the Y-Axis linear rail is shedding ball bearings at an extraordinary rate. I've priced the rails and decided to move forward with replacing them.
Before plunging in, however, I thought I might ping the community to see if anyone has had similar experiences and whether anyone could offer up some tips and tricks to make this process go smoothly. I plan to photo-document the process so as to provide a good reference for others in the future.
I've been coming up with a procedure and it appears the whole y-axis saddle must be taken off to perform this feat. This requires the disconnect of the reader head from the glass scale. Does anyone have any advice on how best to do this without inducing an alignment nightmare upon reassembly? Studying the parts manual, and upon visual inspection, there appears to be a steel block bolted to the carriage which the reader head mounts to. Removing the head should be straight forward, however, there are no locating datums to mount it back...
Additionally, this will involve disconnecting the y-axis ball screw. Since it appears to be fed through the casting, with the ball nut captured, I would assume that undoing the ball nut, sliding the carriage forward into the over travel condition will clear the screw and allow for the carriage to in turn be picked straight off the bed. Assuming the above is correct, might there be issues with re-orienting the y-axis motor to table location as with the spindle belts and tool change orient etc?
As always, any thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.
All the best,
ih