These first few stanzas of the iconic Beatles tune can provide valuable advice to an EDM'er confronted with a challenging machine problem. Here's my story:The fact that I'm a mechanical engineer, toolmaker, ham radio operator with just enough electronics knowledge to make me dangerous and have fifty-five years of EDM experience makes me pretty confident that I can handle most any EDM maintenance issue. In fact, prior to earlier this year, I have never had a paid service call for any of my machines since the early seventies. However, that self-confidence was recently deflated by an issue I had with my twenty-five-year-old lab Charmilles 310 Wire EDM. Over the past year or so, I began to notice that my Y axis was beginning to get noisy when making either high speed manual or rapid programmed positioning movements. Then, in late December, I began to get "following" errors during positioning movements while running programs. The machine diagnostic for this particular error tells you that there is likely a restriction on the axis movement (like contact with an obstruction), and once you clear it, the error will go away. Unfortunately, there was no such restriction. Thus, I concluded that, combined with the axis noise, the lead screwut combination was likely restricting the movement of the axis.
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