Hey guys. My machine had another brain fart yesturday. Its happened a few times in the last couple of weeks. Yeaturday i was running a program that i have run 40 or 50 times no problem. It was a circulair pattern 1.5" down it got about an inch down and took off in another direction.

Any ideas what the problem is and how to fix it

Program was made on fusion 360 cad cam.

Check your wiring to the stepper drivers and in particular make sure the DIR line has not come loose.

Stephen "Highspeed" Kruse

Ok. Ill try that. 2 more things happened today. Hit auto zero and when the tool touched my zero pad it stoped for a sec pushed down and then retracked. Restarted mach 3 and worked fine.  Then doing a circuil pattern again frist trip around when fine then started to step over  but in an oval pattern. Does that make sence to anyone.

Checked my wires. Wiggled wires while moving all axis all worked fine. Checked plug connections did find a small amount of aluminum shavings in them. Dont think they were shorting out but could have been. Checked all connections at the stepper drivers. All were tight. The mother board mounting screws were loose. Thightened them. Rechecking now.

Ran the same program and worked fine. Ran it again right after and started stepping over again. I have my work zero in the center of my table and work out from there. Hit go to zero and its .150 -y. I didnt let the program keep running but last time it kept stepping over. Ill recheck the wires on y axis.   Any other ideas.

Could be a motor going out. Or it could be noise interference. Also, what version of Mach3 are you running? I believe the last posted version (albeit some time ago since development on 3 has stopped) has some known issues and it is recommended to use the previous version.

Stephen "Highspeed" Kruse

When the machine took off in another direction as mentioned in your initial post. Did the tool path show the motion or did it show what was meant to happen?
Hood

My mach 3 version is r3.043.056. Rechecked the wires on y axis with a meter ohms reading good while wiggleing the wires. How would i check the motor to see if its going bad.  Should i switch to mach 4.

I did look on the screen tool path to see if it showed up. The pic was small but it didnt look like it. Tool path looked normal.

Ok, if using the parallel port and the toolpath didn't show the weird motion then it is not Mach that is commanding it and thus it must be an external issue.
Hood