Nextruder Planetary Gears-Routine Lubrication and Cleaning
I decided to clean each toolhead since I passed 1560 printing hours. I opened up the planetary gears on tool 1 which had the most extrusion distance on it. I noted that the grease was black and had hardened quite a bit on non-meshing faces. I found no information on routine lubrication of these gears. There was lube info on assembling the MK4 nextruder. Based on this I cleaned up the gears and relubed with the tube of grease (which is white) that came with the XL.
My concern is that this looked pretty ugly and yet there is no mention of routine cleaning or relubing the gears. There is a YouTube video describing the disassembly and reassembly of the XL nextruder. His was very clean when opened.
Has anyone else found the planetary gear lubrication to be in bad shape after 1500 hours?
I will start on tool 2 next and see if that's the same.
RE: Nextruder Planetary Gears-Routine Lubrication and Cleaning
I wasn't too 1560 but near 1000 when I upgraded mine to a 4S. I decided to clean the gears while I had it today. My grease was dark also, but not hard. I cleaned all of it up and put fresh grease in it as well per the Nextruder assembly instructions.
RE: Nextruder Planetary Gears-Routine Lubrication and Cleaning
I went and opened up the other 4 extruders. Each one had black thick grease but #2 was the dirtiest which makes sense as it had more extruding time on it than the remaining 3. Two of the extruders had the brass gear ring in the wrong orientation (bevel up). Clearly these gears need regreasing on a regular basis. I'm going to relube every 1500 hours.