Hello,
How long motors for X-Y and their gearboxes are expected to last?
Gearboxes have a quite big load for their size, how long
Has anyone experienced any troubles after prolonged usage of Maslow cnc? Was it 1 hour of use, was it 10-tens of hours of intensive usage, or even hundreds of active operation hours? Maybe thousands?
Questionable for longevity part is not the router or the bit, but Maslow gear - motors, gearboxes, chains, etc.
Please share any opinion on this topic.
There have been a few instances of gears in the motor gearbox getting damaged. Hopefully those are mostly outliers, although it’s pretty reasonable to assume that we’ll hear about more from time to time. As for a MTBF (mean time between failures, a standard estimate of failure rate), I have no guess.
About the only other non-router parts that are likely to see much wear are the chains. Those will definitely wear, but unlike a drive chain on a bicycle, for example, the number of cycles is much smaller and slower, so I would think the real issues there corrosion prevention are perhaps an eventual need for recalibration.
As of chain wear i’m less frightened with it, as the experience with bicycle chains says that it could last quite long in dry conditions covered with Teflon based dry grease (“summer” grease for bicycle chain) - dust, sand particles do not stick to Teflon and causes no wear. Oppositely in wet climate/winter chain would last significantly less due to oil-based grease (“winter” grease for bicycle chain) is frequently washed away with rain, or even salted water from sub-freezing road anti-ice spray, but that not the case in Maslow environment, where the chain would deal only with dry dust from plywood cutting and Teflon based chain grease should deal with that danger quite good.
I’ve experienced one motor failure so far in two years so they do fail, but it seems like hundreds of hours of runtime is reasonable to expect.
The failure mode seems to always be the same gear in the gearbox and I’ve contacted the manufacturer about using different metallurgy for that gear and they say they are working on it. They sent me a bag of the gear which wears out so if anyone wants one I’ve got some
Hey @bar, any chance you can point me in the right direction to purchase the gear you mentioned above? I think id like to replace all gears in gearbox if they are readily available to purchase.
I just got a couple (10 I think) the first time I ordered them, but right now I’m having 300 made from a tougher metal. They should be ready in about two weeks, so I can’t send them to you right now, but I’ll post as soon as I have them.