What is a servo press?

A servo press uses servo motors for precise force and position control during forming operations.

How do I calculate servo press tonnage?

Use our free tonnage calculator at servopress.club/tonnage-calculator.html

Lubrication best practices - what oil and how often?

carl_mfgeng

What oil do you guys use in your servo press lube systems? We're running Mobil DTE 25 because that's what the OEM recommended but I've heard some people use way oil instead.

Also, how often do you change it? Our reservoir is 20 liters and the manual says annual change, but the oil still looks clean after a year. Seems wasteful to dump it if it's still good.

And for the slide gibs — grease or oil? Our press has both options and I'm not sure which is better for our application (progressive die work, 60-80 SPM).

raj_pm

Oil analysis is the most underused tool in press maintenance. We send samples quarterly and it has caught two developing bearing failures before they became catastrophic. Cost is about $30 per sample. The last bearing failure we caught early would have been a $40,000 emergency repair plus 3 days of downtime. Now we have 5 years of trend data and can predict bearing condition 6 months out.

jim_apps

One thing to watch: mixing lubricant brands or types. I've seen shops top off with whatever oil is on the shelf. Different additive packages can react and form sludge. Stick with one brand and type. If you must switch, do a full drain and flush first.

toolndye_dave

switched from way oil to synthetic PAO last year. night and day difference on slide wear. more expensive but worth it.

mchen_servo

The synthetic PAO comment is spot on. We switched our 4 Komatsu presses to Kluber Lamora D68 about 2 years ago and gib wear dropped noticeably. More expensive per gallon but we went from re-adjusting gibs every 6 weeks to maybe every 4 months.

One thing I learned the hard way -- lube frequency matters more than lube quality. We had a press with a perfect oil spec but the auto-lube timer was set wrong and it was only firing every 200 strokes instead of every 50. Burned a gib in 3 weeks. Now I check the lube cycle counter against the stroke counter on every PM. Takes 30 seconds and has saved us twice.