Messages

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General Mach Discussion / Re: Introducing the Dog that finally caught it's tail

« on: April 09, 2015, 08:12:31 PM »

I am reading through the manual again now.  I am still getting confused on some of it, but it is getting a little clearer.  I still have quite a few things to install on the machine too, but it's coming along.

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General Mach Discussion / Introducing the Dog that finally caught it's tail

« on: April 09, 2015, 07:26:10 PM »

Hello everyone, I am Michial, from the Dallas, TX area.  Thought I would introduce myself.  I am learning machining, been working on teaching myself with a manual setup for the past 3 years, and seriously able to produce things of any complexity for the past year, so overall I am a newbie to machining as much as I am to CNC.

I've spent the past year day dreaming and wanting to convert my Smithy Granite iMax 1340 to CNC.  Finally I started the conversion a couple of weeks ago, and as of about an hour ago I was finally able to move my X/Y Axis, and most likely sometime tomorrow I will have the Z-Axis working too.

Anyway, at this point I feel like the Dog that just caught the tail he has been chasing for the past year, now I am wondering what next?  Needless to say I didn't exactly spend a lot of time learning what was coming next, so I am really left with the what next question in my head.

Is there a step by step document that is dumbed down to newbie level that walks through the initial machine setup, starting with the basics like getting the steppers moving in the right direction, making sure that mach3 and the steppers are in sync so that it when mach3 thinks it's moving .001" it is actually moving .001 etc???  Kind of a check list of things that need done before you can run your first program?