Curious if this guy needs to be lubed, on the sliding surface for the fingers. Almost looks like there’s some goop on it already, but I’m not sure.
I’d hate to wear the plastic out from repeated use, but correspondingly I’d hate to eat into the plastic with the wrong kind of grease.
Any thoughts?
– A
It will probably work well without it but if you wanted a little lithium greese would be good.
Lithium grease will work well and teflon lube will work best.
Here is what I have used for my computer mouse wheel and it spins so quiet and smooth! Before, the plastic detent spur gear would make a ratcheting sound when moving the mouse wheel but after I cleaned it up and added this Teflon lube shown below, it completely improved it by 50%! You can buy a much smaller tube online, the image below is just to show what it is.
The above are good suggestions, but it’s also important to note that too much lubrication can be worse than not enough. An excess of grease attracts dirt and dust, which becomes a sticky, gummy mess that can slow and bind mechanisms beyond any problems that you might see with not lubricating it enough.
If you feel that you need some sort of lubrication, then go ahead and use some, but be careful that you don’t use too much, or it might cause more problems later.
If you need it for parts sliding on each other more than gears, a dry lube would be good for plastic (Graphite powder). We use this in all our plastice parts of our rifles in the army.
The grease on the gripper should be ok, most people error by tightening the servo horn down all the way, which can cause binding. The instructions from the mfg recommend you loosen the screw about a quarter turn.
Yup, paid careful attention to that … just thinking down the line, after however many hundreds of iterations, I don’t want the poor thing to be worn 
Thanks!
– A
Well, here’s the gizmo in action. Thanks again to all who’ve given ideas.
The Little Grip is mixed with a Pan&Scan kit, and can be seen about 35 seconds into this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=L6MLfVqPwTY
And it does an admirable job of grasping CD’s and DVD’s without harming them… haven’t had to lube it yet, but I’m watching it for signs of wear.
– A
looks illegal, JK 
Awsome work! Nice smooth movement and precision of the gripper! 8)
Nah, it’s gonna be a burning machine to do backups… the motherboard is a VIA Epia, not enough power to do DVD or even CD ripping. Should be enough to run Nero, though, and do automated backups.
And yeah, the gripper is prolly the most precise part of the thing… too bad I couldn’t use RC servos for all of it =))
– A
That is amazing. You did a great job with the linear slides.
