Hey there guys,
I got a real problem here lately with my cnc. I built this machine for myself this past year and it has been a REAL adventure learning to do it and how to use it. It took me a little while to get it all working and get the bugs worked out but after that it ran for QUITE a while many many months of good service and made me some cash which I really need right now. I am out of work due to a major surgery that I needed on my lung. I have been using the machine to make some small parts that I sell and it would run for MANY MANY hours without issues. I recently got the spindle setup which is a Teco sensorless vector drive and using my C11g board and some relays I got the spindle to be completely controlled my mach in both speed, direction, and stop. It worked like this and even did some tapping with a floating head easily. A couple weeks ago my computer started giving me issues so I had to replace it with a used one I bought off craigslist. I took off everything that has been loaded on it and loaded mach3. It had been running with that for awhile but lately I am getting some weird stuff happening. The computer will freeze up on me and the drives sometimes fault during a program. I have been pulling my hair out trying to find the cause and thought it was the spindle drive which is located in the same large enclosure as the geckos,bob,pps, etc. The computer USED to be inside there too but this new one does not fit so it sits underneath it. I have so far completely disabled the spindle both electronically and in the Mach3 software and have been running a simple program to test it out and it STILL faults and it is not JUST one axis any time. Sometimes it is the X, sometimes it is the Z, one time the Y axis started to creep away on me slowly and I managed to hit the E-stop before it crashed. I have all the limits and homes working and I can reference the machine. I have tried to play with all my wiring connections to make sure I do not have a loose wire or something. It is a crazy thing because this little 15 minute program SOMETIMES will run thru without any problems then sometimes it will fault on the second or third operation. It is just pure craziness and I am at MY WITS END HERE!! I have spent the last two weeks trying to find the problem and it still eludes me. This machine HAD been extremely reliable and run almost daily for a long time. Now it is all crazy and I do not know what the hell happened. I am NO electronics expert here and I do not have an O-scope here to test it out.
The machine has an Antek all in one toroidal transformer PPS, three Gecko G320's, an CNC4PC C11G bob, a Teco sensorless Vector drive. I am using some largish 1125 Oz. in. keling inc. motors and AMT encoders on all three axes. I have noticed that my X axis pot settings HAVE to be down on the very lowest end of the gain settings but the limit can be all the way up. All three axes are pretty quiet when the machine is running and everything is smooth and quiet right up til it starts to fault on me. I can leave the machine on for hours all day without any movement and it never locks up of shuts down or faults. I have run the driver test and it is saying excellent. I have turned off all the power save features in the computer and tried everything I can think of to get it to work. Can a computer cause the Geckos to randomly fault? Can a PPS do it? What the hell is going on here so I can get it fixed!! I have been running the same program in air to see if it will fault and it sometimes will run the whole program without any issues and then sometimes it will fault. This is with NO SPINDLE and no power to the spindle the only things hooked up are the geckos on the three axes. NO coolant pump, no nothing.... Just the basic three axis machine. I have the controller running off 110vac as well as the computer and the monitor on the same power outlet. I am TOTALLY lost here and TOTALLY screwed because I need this machine to work both because I am trying to use it to offset my lack of income and because I have it for sale so I can sell it with some other equipment I have here to get into a commercial machining center for my shop because I do not think I will be able to go back to my woodworking profession due to my health issues. I would appreciate ANY assistance here. Please do not ask me to start swapping parts and components because I am pretty tapped out right now. The only spare components I have are another G320 and a used AMT 102 encoder I replaced awhile back.... Thanks for any assistance in advance... peace
Pete