HAAS grease reservoir re-fill

[Djstorm100]

Not a single person out of our HFO in PA will ever say there are any known problems. I'm sure they are trained to play dumb or maybe are dumb. Is there a difference? We have 10 or so Haas machines of different flavors but all NGC.

There is something involving the grease system that needs to be addressed right away if you still have the older plastic canister. That plastic canister tends to explode spontaneously. Again, Haas won't admit this is a known issue but it happened on one of our machines and as soon as it did my brother took a picture and put it on facebook. All of a sudden people were coming out of everywhere with pictures of grease bomb carnage in their air cabinets. Extremely common issue? Maybe not. Common enough for HFO to know? For Sure!! Luckily nobody was hurt but plastic shrapnel and grease goes flying everywhere when it happens so it's a major liability. I told the HFO to send us a replacement grease system for all of our remaining machines with the old plastic style and they sent a tech out to do it without asking any questions. Most of our machines are used and well out of warranty. Unfortunately our VF4ss that exploded is cursed with a drip pan under the air cabinet for the rest of it's life to catch the slowly oozing purple goo.

The grease lines getting clogged is a common problem on all of our NGC machines regardless of grease. Either the HFO is lying or they have so many other issues they can't keep track of all the "common" ones.

You are referring to the plastic canister which were not ngc. They switch to oil filter looking canister that’s metal to prevent the exploding part

I had my machine for 18 months bought new and sold it. Let it be someone else’s problem. Haas on IG blocked me for a month after tagged their ass when that pos was getting removed from my shop

My HFO was pretty darn good. The factory support sucked.


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[Billy_C]

We had multiple NGC machines with the plastic can. The plastic can exploded on a NGC machine. I'm not sure when exactly Haas switched to the metal can vs the plastic but it was after the switch to NGC.

 

[draganm]

wow, exploding grease canisters, one more thing to worry about, and with my luck lately on machine break-downs, almost guaranteed to happen before i retire.
The local HFO sales is great, service is terrible, and there has been massive turnover there. Last time i drove a long way to get the parts myself.
If anyone has a part number of the metal canister please post. 2012 VF2, our canister looks like Polycarbonate and it's now 11 years old

 

[draganm]

hold the presses , I went to buy the metal canister and
they are now getting rid of all Grease reservoirs and recommending a switch back to some kind of oil. Will set you back about $1K for the kit and 1 gallon of oil

any have any experience with this?

 

[mhajicek]

hold the presses , I went to buy the metal canister and
they are now getting rid of all Grease reservoirs and recommending a switch back to some kind of oil. Will set you back about $1K for the kit and 1 gallon of oil

any have any experience with this?

Yup. Seems fine so far, knock on wood.

Conversion from red grease to HALO - Oil lube

I have a VF4 with red grease, Haas recently released a conversion kit (93-2755A) to oil lube and I am wondering if anybody has done it? It requires changing the restrictors on the trucks and I am trying to see if it can be done without removing the table. Can you get two wrenches in there and...

www.practicalmachinist.com

 

[metal-ica]

hold the presses , I went to buy the metal canister and
they are now getting rid of all Grease reservoirs and recommending a switch back to some kind of oil. Will set you back about $1K for the kit and 1 gallon of oil

any have any experience with this?

Yes, it's total bullshit. I bought two DT2's at the same time - serial numbers are sequential.

All of a sudden both machines are throwing a residual pressure alarm. Haas previously converted from the red grease to a tan grease. Then we had to do the conversion to oil. Supposedly, they purged my system and switched to oil but I'm still receiving the residual pressure alarm.

I have a VF2ss that's barely out of warranty and that needs the switch as well.

I asked if they had any documentation of why they're switching but they wont divulge that and refuse to admit anything is wrong with the original grease system.

Obviously, if there wasn't anything wrong they wouldn't be forcing all their customers to switch over.

 

[Billy_C]

hold the presses , I went to buy the metal canister and
they are now getting rid of all Grease reservoirs and recommending a switch back to some kind of oil. Will set you back about $1K for the kit and 1 gallon of oil

any have any experience with this?

This is purely speculation since I haven't had the new oiling system on the bench to reverse engineer the thing. The oil conversion still requires the same conversion kit to go from polycarb to metal can, the control orifices are just sized differently to regulate the flow of thinner fluid. The system still looks and functions the same.

 

[draganm]

Yup. Seems fine so far, knock on wood.

not according ot Ryan at Sparrow and Metalica , looks like they're having trouble either with residual pressure or not getting oil everywhere it needs to go .

Based on the limited posts , i think i will wait. Seems like the newer machines switch over no problem, but the older machines with the Red grease (like my 2012 VF2) are not doing so well.

if you look at the HAAS website, the newer machines need very little done to convert them, the Red grease machines, Not something i'm willing to tackle. ripping out lines, installing restrictors in some places but not others, installing newer software, changing parameters, looks like a lot to go wrong.

click on Gray bars to change procedures

Haas Axis Lubrication Oil - Haas Service Manual

www.haascnc.com

I'll continue conversation in the other thread

 

[Vancbiker]

On machines converted to oil, does the used oil drop into the coolant?

 

[Orange Vise]

hold the presses , I went to buy the metal canister and
they are now getting rid of all Grease reservoirs and recommending a switch back to some kind of oil. Will set you back about $1K for the kit and 1 gallon of oil

any have any experience with this?

The retrofit is pretty half-baked.

They made us buy check valves for the X and Y axes on our lathes, in addition to the new oil canisters and the restrictor fittings. We did everything exactly by the book, only to find out the lines weren't routed correctly from the factory. The locations of the X and Y axis lines in the manifold were not where they were supposed to be. Turns out the factory assemblers picked ports on the grease manifold at random. Luckily we were able to identify the correct lines without too much trouble, but only because we had two identical lathes next to each other and noticed the discrepancy between the two. We would not have noticed if we only had one lathe.

The restrictor is attached to the C-axis lube line on the lathes. It over restricts and I could clearly see a massive air bubble in the line that was never going to clear. So I had to ditch the restrictor.

After going through all this and seeing how they've changed their grease recommendations what.... at least four times now? I decided to say F-it and got 1-gallon jugs of ISO 1000 food grade gear oil for $50 a piece from McMaster. The Mobil equivalent that they recommend is 3X the price. I filled the original brown grease canisters directly and didn't bother with any more restrictor fittings. Final cost: $12.50 per machine.

YMMV.

 

[draganm]

On machines converted to oil, does the used oil drop into the coolant?

hard to imagine it going anywhere else. Back in the Olden days we used to have to skim this " way lube" oil from the tanks often as it was quite the Petri dish for bacterial growth

 

[Orange Vise]

On machines converted to oil, does the used oil drop into the coolant?

About the same as the grease, but they recommended cutting the lube cycle in half from six down to three hours, so expect twice as much.

Depending on the machine, you're more likely to see a bunch of oil on the ground.

 

[draganm]

After going through all this and seeing how they've changed their grease recommendations what.... at least four times now? I decided to say F-it and got 1-gallon jugs of ISO 1000 food grade gear oil for $50 a piece from McMaster. The Mobil equivalent that they recommend is 3X the price. I filled the original brown grease canisters directly and didn't bother with any more restrictor fittings. Final cost: $12.50 per machine.

uggh, that's not good road but at least you got an outcome you can live with. I still have the plastic red grease reservoir, so i need ot figure out what to do.
No way i'm replacing all these lines in purple from copper to plastic