Warco mill lubrication

[Peter VennParticipant @petervenn53369]

I have just purchased a new Warco VM 16 milling machine and set it up.
The manual is the worst of any manual I have ever come across for any new product. Warco should be ashamed of it and it gives minimal information and is written in pigeon English despite having their name splashed all over it.

That said I am unclear about lubrication of the quill and gears. There is a removable plug on the right hand side of the head which shows the gears and and the symbol next to it shows a grease gun which to imply that grease should be applied, but the gears run extremely fast and I would have thought oil would be better. I’m not sure whether this is meant to be reservoir reservoir.
Furthermore lubrication of other parts is basically absent from the manual and not lubrication points are not even mentioned.

Does anybody have a more comprehensive manual?

Grateful for any help!
Peter Venn

[Martin of WickParticipant @martinofwick]

This may help

https://cdn0.grizzly.com/manuals/g0704_m.pdf.

There is no oil reservoir for the gears. If metal, the best  I could do is get a lolly stick and try to smear some molyslip on such gears as was able to reach through the little hole in the headstock. Take off the cover to access the upper gears from the motor. All quite pointless as any lubricant you put on will be flung off in any case.

This class of mill is only intended to have a few hundred hours of use before failure of some sort. The real problem for the Wartco flavour WM16 is that the commonly available belt drive conversion is not possible to implement (grinds teeth in rage and frustration).

Before using, get yourself a good set of ear defenders.

[Bill PhinnParticipant @billphinn90025]

On my WM18 I just squirt some aerosol white lithium grease through the small hole on to both the spindle gears and intermediate gears while the mill is running slowly. It doesn’t need doing very often. If you ever tilt your mill’s head there may be access to the gears from the back via a thin access plate, which will let you get a better look at what you’re dealing with.

There is no metal-on-metal of the gears on my mill; metal gears couple with plastic.

Putting any significant quantity of oil in the gear case of my mill wouldn’t work too well as the oil would seep out of the rear access port very readily and you would always be left with only about 1/2” of oil at the bottom of the gear case, which would do nothing except prevent rust forming on the gear case’s floor.

As for the quill, I put a thin coat of Mobil Vactra no. 2 or 4 on it. This needs doing even less often than the gears.

[Brian WoodParticipant @brianwood45127]

I find it especially sad that so many of these machines, and lathes, are sold accompanied by the most appalling manuals. So often I have read Forum answers that in every case suggest Grizzly in the States have far better machine manuals for what seem to be identical products.

Why is it that our suppliers fail so dismally in this respect? Furthermore, in this case from the answers above, it seems that lifetime is expected to be short; a case of planned failure that is grossly unfair on the buyer. So much for the New World.

What do others think?

Brian

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I think my hobby mill must have several 1000 hours on it over the 14 years I have had it so don’t take one persons comment as read.

Had the lathe for almost as long, given what the purchase price was I could afford to throw it away about 10 times & buy a replacement and still have a bit of change compared to the cost of a new Myford. So don’t really see anything unfair in that.

[Martin of WickParticipant @martinofwick]

The populous demands ‘cheap’.

The manufacturers respond and produce ‘cheap’.

So what becomes commonly available is ‘cheap’ where issues of quality, longevity, ease of use etc are of decreasing relevance.

 

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

For many other products nowadays it is just a web link to download. Other websites, some scammers, are selling that information or flaky scans of manuals for older products. It comes down to costs/profit.
When I got my first lathe some 40 years ago it came with limited screwcutting tables in the manual. So I calculated the missing ones and sent details to the importer for a single A4 sheet suggesting they supply it with every lathe. They responded that it was too expensive – ie they didn’t care and just wanted to slap a label on each package and ship it not bother with customer service.

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