trouble with delivery grippers on Miehle V-50X

Haven’t posted on here is a coon’s age. But we’ve got an uh-oh. My pressman was running a job on the V-50X, and sheets weren’t dropping down to the delivery table fast enough, so he tried adjusting the gripper fingers down to a lower angle. They were so low that when the delivery arm went forward, they didn’t clear the cylinder. Instead, they smacked into it. Amazingly, none of the fingers were damaged badly. Then there was a big clunk, and now the gripper arm doesn’t go forward all the way to the cylinder, and it goes backward too far. So the travel is shifted backward. The arms seem to be tight on the shaft on the bottom. The pin hole on the crank on the side is still lined up. Nothing is cracked. The cam and followers that move everything seem to be OK. The cam that’s attached to the feeder is not out of time, and it’s bolted to the delivery cam, so I think the cam’s OK.

Any ideas, anybody? I can try loosening the bolts that hold the delivery arms and adjusting them, but I thought I’d ask here first. In 50 years of printing, I ran a V-45 briefly in the mid-70s, and another one briefly in the 90s, and this press for the last 3 years, but I really don’t have a lot of troubleshooting experience on it. Thank you all for your help.

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I would look at these pins- some may be broken. In case the image wont load, there is one at the bottom of each delivery arm, and one at the end of the shaft on the crank (you see that one after opening the side panel)

image: Scan.jpg

Scan.jpg

The arms are made of aluminum and are easily bent out of shape upon a mishap such as you described. I think the arms would bend before the pins break that Scott was talking about. Try to find a donor press and swap out the arms. Bud

perhaps- it should be easy to see if they have been bent

Hello, give my associate Jack Poirier at Zenith Diecutting a call. We have 4 V-50’s on line running daily and 4 more for parting out.
We also have as set of Deluxe Check Printers Machinist repair manuals for reference (worth their weight in gold or TP in today’s world -lol)
Jack - Zenith die cutting 508 877- 8811
Ted Lavin Artificer Press 508 208 8444
see if we can help.

Hello, give my associate Jack Poirier at Zenith Diecutting a call. We have 4 V-50’s on line running daily and 4 more for parting out.
We also have as set of Deluxe Check Printers Machinist repair manuals for reference (worth their weight in gold or TP in today’s world -lol)
Jack - Zenith die cutting 508 877- 8811
Ted Lavin Artificer Press 508 208 8444
see if we can help.

Here’s where we are so far. We removed one of the gripper arms to check the pin. 2727 printer is right. The pins are 3/8” dia. steel. There’s no way they would break before the aluminum arms. The crank on the side of the press should have a taper pin in it, but it doesn’t, and the hole in the crank is smaller than the hole in the shaft, so a taper pin wouldn’t fasten the crank in place on the shaft anyway. We loosened the other arm and retightened both of them together, and rotated the crank just a degree or two, and now we’re pretty close. The grippers still don’t grab the sheet from the cylinder though, so we have more tweaking ot do. Thanks for the tip, Ted. And thanks everyone else. We’ll keep at it. The virus hasn’t diminished our work yet, so we’ve had to shift jobs to the Kluges to meet deadlines. We’ll get back to repairs next week. I’ll post again when we either fix it or get stuck.

Were the aluminum arms bent?