Chromatography Forum

I have a CP-8400 Autosampler which goes through its startup routine moving left to right about 15 cm either way sounding great, but when it goes to swing around it makes an awful grinding noise and stops and gives an error. It was working great this morning, and I had to shut down the machine while the lab lost power and compressed air for a couple hours. When I started it back up it has this issue that fixed itself two weeks ago, but won't clear up now.

Here is a video of the issue

My CP-8400 had a similar issue about a year ago. No service contract so we ended up having to disassemble the tower and clean the interior area near the swivel point really well, for a sealed box a surprising amount of grime ended up on the wipes used. I had a coworker who has taken apart and put together several models of autosampler, which helped with my nervousness at disassembling the whole thing. It's rather simple, really. Just make sure to recalibrate injector and vial 0 positions after setting the whole thing back up.

You may want to wait for other feedback before you go through that trouble however. It's possible your issue is something else entirely.

Thanks, that's kind of what I feared. I played with it the following morning there is some black grime working its way out of the edges of the base, back I got it to work by manually maneuvering it back and forth turned off of course. Luckily my lab is still under contract so I can let a tech come in and deal with cleaning and oiling it. I had considered shooting some light machine oil in there but l figure that would just make sludge and prolong the inevitable. I'm glad to hear it isn't some fail-safe written in, as something like that would have really been a pain to deal with.