Brass Pinions on Servos

After over 800 hours, the x drive on my main machine has been making more and more "noise". I noticed before that the mesh at the servo was loose and have tried "pushing" the servo closer. This time, after wiping off the grease and having a close look, I could see the little brass pinion was really quite worn. The gear teeth were sharp. (Maybe I should have listened to Al years ago and used place on end instead of place on center!)

Anyway, I also noticed that only 1/2 of the gear is actually used. The pinion is a press fit on the 1/8" shaft, so I heated it up (propane pencil flame) slid it off and flipped it over. The x drive sounds like new again. (This is the kind of thing one has to do if one lives in Canada.)

So, the news flash is: brass servo pinions can be removed with only a little heat. This means one can flip pinions or even swap pinions between servos.

Thanks for the info. Good to no.

that is very good to know thx for the info

Thx Dan .... What's a servo ?? Ha :p

Servos are the motors used to control the X, Y, Z movements.

As opposed to a stepper motor.

Dan, I may be dense on what gear you may be talking of, I have not tore the x gear apart..It has worked fine up to this point, like you, I have about 800 hrs. on my machine and have noticed a noise not consistant when I bought the machine it sounds like a lite grinding noise but it is still is working is that the noise that you heard on yours it doesn't sounds off only about half of the of the up and down movement

I am talking about the little 10 tooth brass gears that are press fit on the shafts of the servo motors. My x drive had a bit of a rattle to it because the little brass gear was so worn.

I think I can just replace it with a brass pinion part (simple and crude), and the good news is that it happens to be available on steppermotor.