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General Mach Discussion / I'm Back - But need Help
« on: March 19, 2014, 08:51:04 AM »
Hello All,
I have been in a Hiatus status for over 2 years, but am back finally. I retired and then moved to Washington State to be near the grand kids. We have a great 2 ½ acre plus site in the trees which even has a pond with an island. It is off the beaten path, but close enough to amenities and is absolutely gorgeous. This has been keeping me busy to say the least for a while.
Anyway, finally found time to unbox the CNC outfit and get it up and running. Everything seemed to function and of course I am having to relearn almost everything. Unfortunately I have a couple of problems that I did not have before. Hopefully you Guru’s can understand my wording and help me come up with a solution.
First issue is the machine will be chugging along and then just stop. No repeatability and completely random. I have tried various things to stop this and nothing has helped. Second issue which is the real problem is that when I try to continue it takes off in X and Y all on its own. It then plunges to the depth that Z was at before it stopped and of course “Bang” there goes an expensive carbide cutter plus wasted expensive material. This obviously can’t continue.
I have now started air cutting, trying different things and have found some interesting issues. It looks like I can force mach 3 to throw an error which appears to match what has been happening. The code will be running and I will hit the screen stop button. Everything of course stops, but when I restart the program X and Y will swing out and circle around clockwise. Eventually it finds the correct and original cutting line and then continues on as if nothing was wrong. Now the strange one is that if I hit the screen pause button and then restart things everything is OK and works like it should. Even stranger is that the buttons on my pendant act just the opposite of the screen buttons. Stop allows me to stop and start without issues, but pause causes the X and Y error.
I am going to try add a copy of the machine code and a screen shot showing the original circle cutting path and the obvious crazy error path.
Running under Windows 7
Version of Mach 3: Licensed and whatever was current January 2012
(I know, I should just go ahead and load the latest)
Thanks in advance
Mark
I have been in a Hiatus status for over 2 years, but am back finally. I retired and then moved to Washington State to be near the grand kids. We have a great 2 ½ acre plus site in the trees which even has a pond with an island. It is off the beaten path, but close enough to amenities and is absolutely gorgeous. This has been keeping me busy to say the least for a while.
Anyway, finally found time to unbox the CNC outfit and get it up and running. Everything seemed to function and of course I am having to relearn almost everything. Unfortunately I have a couple of problems that I did not have before. Hopefully you Guru’s can understand my wording and help me come up with a solution.
First issue is the machine will be chugging along and then just stop. No repeatability and completely random. I have tried various things to stop this and nothing has helped. Second issue which is the real problem is that when I try to continue it takes off in X and Y all on its own. It then plunges to the depth that Z was at before it stopped and of course “Bang” there goes an expensive carbide cutter plus wasted expensive material. This obviously can’t continue.
I have now started air cutting, trying different things and have found some interesting issues. It looks like I can force mach 3 to throw an error which appears to match what has been happening. The code will be running and I will hit the screen stop button. Everything of course stops, but when I restart the program X and Y will swing out and circle around clockwise. Eventually it finds the correct and original cutting line and then continues on as if nothing was wrong. Now the strange one is that if I hit the screen pause button and then restart things everything is OK and works like it should. Even stranger is that the buttons on my pendant act just the opposite of the screen buttons. Stop allows me to stop and start without issues, but pause causes the X and Y error.
I am going to try add a copy of the machine code and a screen shot showing the original circle cutting path and the obvious crazy error path.
Running under Windows 7
Version of Mach 3: Licensed and whatever was current January 2012
(I know, I should just go ahead and load the latest)
Thanks in advance
Mark