X-Axis Slide Repair

A customer dropped off an X-axis slide—our fourth or fifth one—and I’m unsure which machine it belongs to, but that’s not critical. The slide bolts to linear guides, visible on this plate here. We used dummy blocks to recreate the bedways, then ground the top surface and dovetail. The issue is that the machine runs constantly on a single product line, causing it to go through ball screws repeatedly due to a hole in this section. After the second or third ball screw failure, the customer realized it’s an alignment issue, not a ball screw problem.

The other side of the slide, which mates to this part, flips upside down here. We’ve already ground the top to ensure it’s parallel to the flats, but the flats are completely trashed. I’m using an indicator—though I’m not a fan of this one—and after zeroing it out, we’re at about 10 thousandths off. We’ll likely remove more than that to clean up the lines, as the constant operation misaligned the metal-on-metal contact, causing it to wear itself out.

To fix this, we’ll surface grind the part, cheating a bit since the wheel loads up quickly at this angle, then use a way grinder to true up the dovetail angle. We’ll grind both sides of the dovetail, hand-scrape it, and likely remove 15 thousandths from the center surface. This means adjusting the nut housing by 23 thousandths since we’ve removed material from the flats. We’re also taking material off the master and gib, which may require adding turcite to restore the centerline or elongating the holes—depending on the final alignment. Once done, we’ll grind everything and film another video to show the results and material removed.