I have a 10-minute Friday flush with 3% hydrogen peroxide on a NIDEK LE-1200, daily swarf vacuum, and I train new users to dry the chuck and wheels every 10 cuts. Still getting odor in the tank and the occasional micro-scratch by mid-week — what maintenance or user training tweaks have helped you prevent this without taking the lab offline?
Adding a 150–200 µm filter sock on the return line to the LE-1200 tank stopped my mid-week ‘odor in the tank’ and micro-scratch — zip-tie it over the return so it traps fines, then swap/rinse the sock mid-week with no downtime. If you don’t have room for a sock, a short piece of aquarium filter foam on the return barb works but needs a quick daily rinse. Do you have space on the return for a small sock?
A small training tweak that’s helped us is a “rinse before remount” rule — every time the lens comes out for inspection, we give the lens faces, chuck jaws, and pads a 2–3 second squeeze‑bottle rinse with clean tank water, then blot, so fines don’t migrate and cause sleeks or stink… It added maybe 10 seconds per job and didn’t slow throughput; if you get foaming, switch to distilled in the bottle. Do you already keep a squeeze bottle at the LE‑1200, @OP?