Lubricating bearing gcodes  

Lubricating bearing gcodes

I really need to tear down my MK3S to clean out and re-pack the bearings with grease because of random layer shifts, but I don't have a good window in my current printing commitments. So I'm keeping running with semi-frequent application of 3-in-1 oil. I finally decided that instead of manually moving the print head and bed back and fourth (potentially damaging the drivers with the back emf), and moving like that by hand in the z is nearly impossible without disconnecting the trapezoidal nuts from the carriage. So I decided to try hand-coding some gcode files to move each axis to work the newly applied oil into the bearings. The result are these three gcode files (zipped together): AxisLubrication

Each file works an individual axis, and go through the 6 sweeps twice, first at half maximum speed (6000mm/min for x&y, 360mm/min for z), and then at full speed (12000mm/min for x&y, 720mm/min for z). Each set of sweeps starts with a "short wipe" from 0 to [axis max] by moving "forward" by 10mm and then "backwards" by 5mm, all the way along the axis. The next two movements move back to zero and then back to [axis max]. The fourth sweep is a similar "short wipe" doing the similar 10mm forward and 5mm backwards going from [axis max] to 0, again followed by two movements to [axis max] and back again.

For the x and y axis gcodes all the movements overshoot the printing area by 5mm, so on my printer sometimes the x axis bangs against the right z-axis mount. (Maybe I should reduce the overshoot to 4mm there?) I intentionally didn't overshoot the printing area for the z-axis to avoid smashing nozzles into the print bed (either by a direct negative movement command, or loosing steps because the maximum height overshoot topped out against the brackets before finishing the move).

The x and y axis gcodes only take a couple minutes, but the z axis gcode takes somewhere around 8 minutes. 

I'm releasing these gcode files into the wild for anyone to use and/or abuse, public domain style. I didn't even bother putting an attribution in comments at the start of the files. I did try to write these to easily change the speed by first setting the movement speed and then doing a bunch of moves w/o specifying a speed. This way if one wants to change speeds there is only one line that needs to be modified, not 206 lines (as in the x-axis gcode).

@bobstro If you like these, feel free to add them to the printer maintenance section of your website. An attribution would be nice, but not necessary.