Hello everyone, My name is Mike and I'll start off by telling you my situation. When I was first hired to run this CNC router it didn't even run and I had no experience on one, just knew a bit about electronics and computers. It was purchased off ebay from a company going out of business and came with incomplete software, etc. Before I came along someone else got the machine almost to working condition but Mach3 would not move the machine. It turned out the XML file and Mach 3 needed some minor tweaking and was achieved thanks to people like you on this forum. Since then I also added a smoothstepper. The person I had fix the XML file said there was a lot of extra junk code in the XML file and it would take weeks to take it all out and said the machine should run right but with thrown together software and a iffy XML file who knows.
Since then the machine has carved hundreds of carvings but not without it's mistakes. Most the time the problem will be the Y-axis lags and shifts the carving in the middle of a carving up or down. After troubleshooting, just by looking at the machine it looked like one of the screws for the Y-axis was spinning faster than the other side. But that was just to the naked eye. After attempting another carving it did the same thing, bumped the carving up a half an inch. I did some more troubleshooting and tried rotating one of the screws by hand, it would not turn one way but would VERY easily the other way untill it got ahead of the other screw, which showed that the machine was ahead/behind on one side and cocked at an angle. I did measurements from the machine to the motors on both sides of the machine and the machine was ahead .25 inch on one side. Seeing how days before this troubleshooting I cleaned and adjusted the whole machine so that it was straight, level, and all measurements were perfect, it seems to me one side/screw of the Y-axis is spinning faster/slower than the other.
As far as what would cause this I could only guess... I know it has been messing up a little more lately so could a motor be going out? Any way to adjust and calibrate each particular motor using Mach 3? Any help would be appreciated.
Mike