[Tormachmaster]

Has anyone tried the cheaper ebay oilers I see? I have been using the regular hand unit because I only do prototype work and no real long runs but have been thinking it would be nice to have then saw the cheaper ones on ebay and amazon and figured it may save some cash.

[ihavenofish]

i bought one for my mini router. looks nice enough, its 100% plastic, so i expect the mounting bracket to smash off if you put it somewhere in traffic. I havent used it yet, so no comment on that.

[CL_MotoTech]

I have one on my G0704. I quite like it. Last night I ran a program that was more than four hours long. Rather than sit around and watch the machine hum I went to bed. I have the pump set to 1cc every 20 minutes. When I went out this morning to check on everything there were a few drips of way oil on the enclosure floor under the table. Nice! The part turned out too! Double nice!

The big problem I have with the pump right now is that I am just plugging it into the wall manually. Ideally it would turn on when the machine is running and turn off when it stops. It's easy to forget about, and it's not cool when a liter of oil is pumped through the mill when it's not even running. I could probably handle this with a macro in Mach 3 or UCCNC (PP probably has this already?), I just haven't thought too much about it yet. The other issue I have right now, one that Tormach owners won't likely have to deal with, is that I've not quite worked out how to keep all my oil lines full. They tend to drain over time, which means I have to purge the lines at machine startup. The pumps are a tad slow, so it can take a few minutes to do that. It's not a terrible experience, but if your lines drain it's something you'll have to think about. I am looking at a few more check valves to solve my problems, or perhaps just lower the pump so that if the lines drain they try to drain back to pump, and the metering block should stop that. I'm off track now, but for $50 the automatic oiler works quite well in my eyes, but I'm more of a hobby guy than a full stop machinist. So take my words for what they are.

[CL_MotoTech]

What I should do is set M7 to run my automatically oiler, then just change the screenset to reflect oil instead of mist. It would allow me to turn the oil on and off via GUI, then I would just have to tell my CAM to turn on mist for my program. Setup would take like a half hour of messing around, I'd just have to run a 120v relay to pump and set the ports and pins.