Oil Feed Retrofit For A CNC Mill Starting To Come Together

oil-feed-retrofit-for-cnc-mill

Here is the first real fruit of [Joel’s] labor on his oiling system for a CNC mill. Regular readers will remember hearing about his quest to go from a manual mill to a CNC version. As part of the overhaul he decided to add a system that can dispense oil to the different wear parts on the machine. We first looked in on the project when he showed off the pipe bender he built for the task. Now that he has that at his disposal he was able to route tubing to many of the parts.

The system starts with a central brass manifold which is pictured in the foreground. Each pipe was bent and cut to reach its destination with a minimum of wasted space. After a test fit showed good results he brazed the pieces together using silver solder. Each of the ball nuts have been drilled out so that oil will be injected onto the threads of the ball rod. Three input ports on the manifold will eventually let [Joel] connect the oil injection system via flexible tubing.

8 thoughts on “Oil Feed Retrofit For A CNC Mill Starting To Come Together

    1. Amazing design, craftsmanship, and execution, but I too feel he will probably be chasing leakdown all over the place. People new to CNC don’t realize that even one drop of ATF every five minutes still adds up to a lot when doing it to multiple ways and screws, and is still more than enough wind up with a big puddle all over the floor during even any moderate length of cut.
      Machines just don’t need manifolds that size unless he’s using the oil as a flood coolant!

      1. ATF? I seriously hope no one uses ATF. Way lube is the proper lube for this, I use Vacuoline 1409.

        Typically the oilers are on timers and send a pulse every 10 to 15 minutes depending on the machine.

        1. Timers, eh?

          I look forward to seeing great sketches of the lubrication system concept and implementation! With histograms of oil delivery per minute, and also some charts of oil per inch of way motion ;)

  1. Very nicely built but way too much work when you can get the proper Bijur metering units and manifolds cheap off ebay. The metering units proportion the amount of old to the different sections of the machine.

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