Hi All,
I'm new to CNC'ing and Mach3 but over the last couple of months have slowly been working through the issues with my Taig2000 micro mill setup with a Microproto controller which I recently purchased second hand.
After many, many hours of setting up and debugging the setup I thought I had it sussed but I now have one final issue to resolve.
I was machining a part over the weekend and all was looking good until disaster happened. At end of a profile run the Z axis didn't physically move back its safe height even though the DRO on Mach3 showed that it did. The motor itself didn't make any noise so it wasn't stalled as I had when configuring the machine initially (I know that noise well), it just didn't move. The consequence of this was a nice machined groove across the surface of my part and then the Z axis tried to plunge the bit back through the work piece due to it being out of position relative to the DRO.
I think I may have caught a situation a little like this before where when jogging around the Z axis fails to respond. If I then move either the X or Y axis and go back to the Z axis it then moves normally (I have never looked to see if the DRO is still moving in this situation). I am using the Joypad plugin with a Logitec Joypad to jog and I had wondered if this could cause have caused this issue but not sure if would have any affect when running a program.
I have Mach3 R3.043.022 installed and I'm now running on a 3GHz P4 dedicated PC with a PCI parallel card and all the suggested windows XP optimizations in place after a lot of trial and error to begin with.
Anyone have any suggestions?