CW Maintenance

I guess the only thing tougher than doing an over 250 hour maintenance run on one machine is to have to do it on 2 machines :) ... I put the whole day aside yesterday to get both of my machines up to date on maintenance. My older C machine has about 275 hours on it and I thought my newer C machine had about the same. I guess I need to pay closer attention as it has about 350 carving hours on it...Ouch. All went well until it was time to change the brushes and I really didn't want to remove the motor to get at the lower brush. The top cover unscrewed easily, but I left the wires attached and was able to move it far enough away from the motor that the top brushes were changed quite easily. Not the same for the lower ones. I didn't have a screw driver with a wide enough blade that was short enough to fit inside the carve area without fear of damaging the brush cover. So off to my local hardware store and we came up with just the right tool. I bought a chiseled edge very stiff putty knife and ground off the chiseled edge and shortened both the length of the knife and the width of the blade. With the top cover back on, I put the CW on its side, had my bride hold the extension tray open and viola, it worked like a champ. All is well with both of my CWs and today I plan to change the sandpaper belts on the older machine to the heavy duty rubber ones. I am about to move my shop 550 miles north and west to a building I bought and remodeled in my hometown. I hope to use one of the machines as a dedicated rotary jig machine and the other for production work. I guess I better pay closer attention to the usage to make sure they are maintained at the proper time.

On a side note, I can't emphasize enough the importance of good dust collection. I put dust hoods on both of my machines almost immediately after purchase and the difference is amazing. Not only were they both quite clean before the maintenance process, even after 350 hours of carving, I had more than 25% of the brushes left on that machine and about half of the brushes left on the CW with about 275 hours. I am not advocating ignoring the recommended schedule at all, it is just good to know that a clean machine can help forgive an operator who doesn't pay attention close enough, but should.

I also thanked LHR several times for designing a machine that didn't need a computer hooked to it. I brought my mini ipad out to the shop so I could watch the videos of the maintenance procedures while I was working. Even though I have a relatively clean shop with good dust collection to each tool, every time I hit the air compressor to clean something on my CW, I had to pay attention to the dust around the ipad. I remembered the memory card was one of the main items that attracted me to the CarveWright and I don't regret that one bit!! Great machines that serve me well everyday!!


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I like your building, only problem, there is white frozen stuff on the outsde... Burrrr...

The snow will be gone in a month or so.... :)

That is a nice building. Thanks for the tip on brush cap removal, it is very easy to ruin the slot and not be able to remove the cap.

Thank you, rmock. I think the building will work well for us. It was built in the early 1880s and has seen a lot of different uses (from a saloon to a hardware to a mortuary to a grocery to a dentist office :) ). I agree the cap can easily be ruined...especially the lower cap as any dust off the brush will fall straight down and can gum up the threads...