Hot Weather Tips for CNC Machines

Summer Heat poses some challenges for ensuring that CNC Machinery is performing optimally. Effectively, your machine's electronic components are sensitive to high temperatures and it is important to ensure that they are not exposed to hdeat to avoid costly breakdowns.

Here are some tips to help you make sure your equipment is running smoothly in the summer.

1. Keep clutter to a minimum
   To promote good airflow, Keep the area around the electrical cabinet open and free of items that will impede the air flow like work benches, storage bins, tooling rakes anything that will block the air movement and retain heat in the cabinet.
2. Close electrical cabinet doors
   When the electrical cabinet over heats, it is tempting to keep the doors open. But this will lead to allowing dust, fine air borne metal partials and atomized coolant particles in the air to contaminate the electrical components like contactors, axis drives and control PCB that can create costly repairs and unplanned down time with premature component failures.
3. Change fan air filters
   Many CNC Machines have some form of electrical cabinet heat management, such as cooling fans, heat exchangers or air conditioning units to keep the electrical cabinet cool. The air filters on these units can and will get clogged and will restrict the air movement. Checking and changing these filters on a regular basis (weekly or monthly depending on the environment) will greatly improve the ability of the cooling units to keep your electrical cabinet cool and ensure proper air circulation inside the electrical cabinet. This is truly the easiest and lest expensive way to reduce unplanned downtime and expensive repairs of premature failure. 
4. Check the batteries
   It's common for a machine's batteries to discharge when the machines are shut down for a prolonged period of time. If you are doing a summer shutdown, be sure to charge your machine's batteries so they will keep the vital components charged. Otherwise, you may lose programming memory and be faced with a service call when you restart your plant.
5. Backup, Backup, Backup !
   Do yourself and your planning department a huge favour, make sure you have a back up of your machine and it’s not a bad plan to make sure you have a yearly backup of the machine as things change and data can get lost with Computer updates or hard drive crashes. When the control backup batteries dies and the control no longer knows it is a machine Control and not a toaster, is a bad time to find out you don’t have a backup to restore the machine.   

Our experienced team at DiPaolo can furnish you with the necessary filters, batteries and components to help with managing high temperatures and plant shutdowns. Contact us for any of your parts or service needs.