[justCNCit]

It's indeed a very glorious day

turns out the parallel port voltage was insufficient to properly control the Xylotex box. I always thought it was 'resonant frequency dampening' which was the problem, but it was still stuttering now and then as if it was jumping, or NOT GETTING SIGNAL.

Sure enough installed Mach 3 on a PC(had it running on a laptop before) I had sitting around with I think a 2GHZ Celeron. Stress tested it for 20 minutes and not a single jump or perceptible missing step. it was very obvious before.

made some resonant frequency dampeners out of MDF and cut 1/2" steel to fit in holes in the periphery of the wheel, and gained quite a bit of performance out of that too. CNC zone pays off, but it did take lots of investment in time. i feel the machine is 99% now in terms of operating capacity. thanks cnc zone

[johnmac]

Doesn't it feel great when the problem reveals itself? Can you post a pic of your damper?

John

[justCNCit]

It feels awesome to have solved the problem. Have to do some more running to be 100% sure, but I think its nailed.

Btw, if you are still starting out with CNC I strongly recommend servos over steppers. But here are the dampeners:





thats cardboard taped to both sides of it. .500" hot rolled steel was cut and placed into the holes which were about .550" in Dia. tremendous rattling (although not that loud) top end rapids have increased about 50 IPM once they were installed, easily. I understand if you run Geckos with the electronic damper circuity this is no longer necessary.

[justCNCit]

best part is when you are 25 min into a 30 min toolpath, and one of my duck taped boards goes loose, the gantry pushes it into the monitor, which then pushes some key on the keyboard, lowering the feedrate to 1% :/

& loosened one end of the gantry stepper coupling. it is always the silliest things with these damned machines when they act up.

[morphious69]

and people wonder why I always over engineer things

[justCNCit]

as a complete noob who went right into CNC, there are some basic machine construction methods I think are pretty good to know, other than that, over engineering only does something for you if you are an engineer.

for example making everything screw adjustable, like taking a square tube and tapping holes in 4 sides of it, inserting your locating rod into the middle of it, and position it using screws, that would have saved a ton of aggravation and time. it almost seems like there should be a FAQ on specific machine design tips, again specific to CNC.