Hi,
I've been having some calibration issues with my mach3 mill. I've set my steps using the step calibration feature and got that right but i went into the MDI panel to double check, triple check... I've been checking each axis numerous times to make sure its right.
for example i put in x1 and it moves exactly 1mm, then I'll move another 1mm - x2 and it will be out by .002mm and then another 1mm and it'll be bang on 1mm again.
i can deal with it being .002mm out but thats small movements (same as what i put above applies to movements of .1mm to 1mm)
I'll then do 2mm increments and it'll be bang on 1st time then .004 then .09 then bang on. the most its gone out is 0.1mm.
the machine will cut good circles and squares, apart from a very slight notch in corners for the circles.
If i run a long program, one being 3hours long for a small block it will cut perfectly for the roughing cuts to get the base shape, that being 1 hour and then the other 2hours being finishing, it will dive into the piece on the last 10,000 ish lines of code, right at the end . I know its not the code that's at fault because it never faults at the same line and i've had a few pieces finish without killing the material.
I'm still new to CNC and everything i know is from playing around, forum reading and youtube videos.
Im using Fusion 360 to design pieces and post to g-code and then use brackets to make small changes to the code.
The machine is a Bridgeport mill thats been converted to CNC with 3 nema-23 motors
The computer that is running it is a dell optiplex 780 series with a dual core CPU 2.93 GHz, 4GB RAM, An Nvidia GT 610 GPU 2GB DDR3 memory and its running Windows 7 Professional 32-Bit with some windows features disabled, such as mouse cursor shadows and unnecessary animations like window minimisation.
the version of mach3 is; R3.043.066
Many thanks,
Alex
(ps. the squares and circles as mentioned before are cut to the size specified and the right depth)