Messages

11

General Mach Discussion / Re: Seeking some help on "drifting" X axis

« on: August 28, 2018, 03:05:17 PM »

Hi,
your X axis is either gaining or loosing steps.

Go though and double check that the couplings are snug and the stepper motor shaft is not slipping.

Can you swap drivers, say take the z axis driver out of service and use it in the X axis drivers place?
 

Craig

Thanks fort the thoughts.  Everything was thoroughly checked when we got the table so I'm pretty sure the couplings are all tight/snug.  From what I can tell, the stepper motor shaft is not slipping either.  Are you reffering to it slipping at the gear or internally in the motor?  

We did essentially swap drivers also.  We swapped output cables for X and Z axis at the driver box (connector out of the driver box that cable to the motor plugs into) so the X motor was plugged into the Z driver and vise versa, then reassigned those drivers to the new axis via the pin assignments on the parallel cable.  The problem stayed in the X.  Ever stepper motors randomly loose steps when they begin to fail?  These motors have virtually no run time, but coming from the automotive field, I have seen plenty of new parts fail right out of the box.  

12

General Mach Discussion / Seeking some help on "drifting" X axis

« on: August 28, 2018, 09:59:12 AM »

We recently got a table second hand that had only been used a couple times. We got this table from an estate sale so the past user is....of no help. It literally only had a couple cuts on it based on the tray below the work piece.

First few cut files we ran were fine, but they were very basic shapes of plate (square, triangle, rectangle). Recently we tried cutting a file that had a series of holes in it and it seems to cause the X axis on the machine to "drift" to the right. In the picture below, this was the cut file run with a marker and cardboard to really see what was going on. The file was run 3 repeated times with each run time started from the finish position of the last run. You can see in the circles that it DOES NOT drift a consistent amount or with a consistent pattern each time-the hole overlap is not the same (thinking it rules out motor step count is wrong in setup as it would be a consistent error). We already swapped X and Z motor output cables from the control box to the motors and reassigned the pin locations on the parallel cable to reflect that-the problem stayed in the X. Also threw a new parallel cable at it just to check.

The computer is an older gateway running XP and IS NOT connected to the internet in any way
Using sheetcam for cam and nesting and Mach3 licenced under CandCNC for control.
The table is a Precision Plasma LLC, kit table that someone put together with a Gecko g540 board.

Open to any thoughts at this point!!