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Messages - rhorne

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General Mach Discussion / Mach 3 Beginner's Questions
« on: August 19, 2015, 11:20:25 AM »
Hi guys.

The company for which I work has just bought a fairly basic run-of-the-mill 3-Axis Chinese CNC Router/Engraving machine.

I've got the demo version of Mach3 up and running and connected to the router. I can control the Axes using the arrow keys. Everything appears to be all fine and dandy, it's just I'm having mixed results when trying to mill the demo files. I'm hoping the answers to the following questions will be able to help:

1) For any given GCODE file, before pressing GO, how do I know where to place the bit? Do I position it to the centre of my working area or the bottom left hand corner? What in the design dictates this?
2) When setting the home position, how far up and down the Z Axis should the bit be? Should I start with it just touching my wood/plastic or raise the Z Axis to the top of its limit?
3) Say, for instance, I have a working area of 15cm x 15cm and I load one of the demo files, e.g. the roadrunner gcode file. If this is much smaller than my working area and I increase the X and Y scale to make it fit, how come when I start the milling process speeds are much, much reduced and the whole process would take hours.
4) Very often when trying to mill a demo file, Mach3 just stops after a few random lines. I am using a desktop PC with a dedicated Parallel port and not a laptop with USB connector before anyone asks.

If someone could give me just a quick overview of their initial working instructions I'd very much appreciate it as I feel like the above simple questions have not been covered in the many hundreds of pages of manuals and youtube videos I've watched.

Thanks in advance.

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