Drives going bad

[[Aa...]]

We just moved 3 Micuras to a new location. In the old location, any time the oldest machine ran full speed in the y-direction, the drives would shut off. It was doing that since less than a year after we got it. We had multiple techs look at it, and they all concluded the issue was the air supply at the old facility (where it was when they looked at it). That was before we got the other 2. After the move, the tech that set the 3 machines up said they each had a drive that was bad, and on the oldest one, the y-drive was the culprit. Replacement drives are back-ordered. Does anyone know if a bad drive will impact result accuracy? My guess would be no, since the machine gets the locations of the measured points from its glass scales.

Also, could running the machines with bad drives further damage the machines?

Thanks!

[[No...]]

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I would agree as long as we talk about single touch point measurements only. But if scanning comes into play, the situation is different. Bad drives might cause vibrations which could influence scanning results.

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I guess this depends on the type of drive and machine construction.

[[Er...]]

We had "mid-air collision" issues for years.
The ball bearings in the drives were overlooked by Zeiss as being the problem.
We passed Zeiss's calibration every year.

[[Me...]]

We had an issue with Y-Drive's cutting out on our Accura (Problem ended up with a bad C99-controller board from 2004), I don't think our situation is the same, but our way to verify our CMM readings was to use ring gauges and gauge blocks. An artifact would be perfect to verify your CMM's but not everyone has that available.

Even with Y-Drives not working, we also passed calibration so I would like to say your readings are safe, but always double check against hard gauges

Hope your situation gets better!.