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Sorry for the delay in responding but it is a pretty old thread. ;-)

I actually have quite a bit of documentation that came with the mill. It will take a while for me to find time to scan it all....

Your shed floor is probably pressure treated plywood. Pressure treated lumber is infused with a copper salt like copper sulfate or copper azole. If you put aluminum in contact with pressure treated...

The quality of the surface finish for a bare casting is pretty much dictated by the quality of your casting. A well compacted aggregate can be polished to a mirror finish without any fillers. The EG...

Granite's longitudinal wave propagation is roughly 5950m/s and transverse is roughly 3450m/s. Without looking up the crystal size or doing any math my estimate puts the molecular resonance closer to...

I have done a lot of experimentation and testing of vacuum degassing and use it almost daily so I'd like to add my 2 cents to this deep vacuum discussion.

If you are making small parts or parts...

First you get air and lots of foam until your first slump, which happens fairly quickly. Next you get moisture which will continue to form bubbles for a long time. You will continue to get moisture...

Oh, and a shaft with a flat on it is known as a D shaft. A slot is a Keyed shaft.

Actually, I misspoke. Just pushing the shaft in won't put the bearing back in place. You need to take the cover off the output shaft side and pry the bearing up.

When you get the cover off you...

Your stepper is probably still good. You can probably use the vice to push the shaft back in until the rotor stops binding against the case. Push the shaft in a tiny amount at a time, checking to see...

The parallel port voltages should indeed be no more than 5.5V. You may have stumbled across a grounding issue. All grounds on your CNC machine should be the same as the PC ground. Connecting a cable...

OK, you are missing the point. Let's me see if I can explain this better.

The software running the machine is made up of several smaller programs that run separately. I don't know how many...

It wouldn't matter if you had a super duper 5 terahertz Pentium 17. Latency is the issue, not raw processing speed.

Lookahead of 100 lines means it will have 100 lines buffered IF they happen to...

Your machine misses steps on the retract when it finishes a really big block of code just before moving to a new part.

What this implies is that the computer is accessing either disk or memory in...

Grounding first so you can keep working:

The shielding is most effective if all signals exit the driver's metal case at one place all of your shielding is grounded at the same point. You don't...

OK Let's recap:
1) You have a problem with the Z retract in one place in a specific program.
2) You tried a few things with the software, including loading an older copy that used to work to check...

I would run this as a separate cable bypassing the one on the machine and see if it fixes the problem. I wouldn't rewire the machine until you find out if the is a wiring problem.

P.S.

Let me...

You do have the ground labeled correctly. You want to tie the shields from all 3 cables to one ground screw, preferably at the same point where any other shielded cables leave the chassis.

You can...

You do have the ground labeled correctly. You want to tie the shields from all 3 cables to one ground screw, preferably at the same point where any other shielded cables leave the chassis.

You can...

The Wattage rating of the resistor is maximum power it can handle reliably. The circuit determines the minimum requirement. You can use a resistor with a higher rating than needed but you can't go...

Sorry to keep you waiting. Here is the probe wiring.
247038

You leave the motors hooked up while you run the program that causes the missed steps. Insert the probes into the same socket that...

The stepper motors and driver outputs are not affected by electrical noise.The object of the shield is to prevent the very noisy motor signals from radiating and disrupting the more sensitive signal...

It will take me a while to write up a clear explanation and I'm in the middle of a project at the moment so I'll get back to you a bit later. Pete

Guess I got sidetracked and didn't actually answer the question. Sorry.

Your phases don't seem to be labeled on the PCB so you need to pull the plug and use an ohm meter to find out which wires...

Hey cncvirgin,

I was wondering how the troubleshooting was progressing.

My belief is that there nothing wrong with the wiring or anything mechanical as the skipping only occurs after a...

3 amps should be more than enough. When you enable the driver, the motor should lock and you should need pliers to turn the shaft. If you can turn the shaft with your fingers you have a problem.
...

First off, you probably can't run that fast if you are doing 20x micro-stepping. 20x micro-stepping cuts your motor torque down to about 5% of the motor's rating.

Full Step = 100%
1/2 Step = ...

They called it a servo but it is definitely a stepper motor. The sound of a stepper motor if quite distinctive and they labeled it as having 1.8 degree steps.

There are several negatives using...

The first thing I would do is try to narrow down problem. I would start by making sure it has nothing to do with the over heating.

Replace the dwell you inserted with a stop. Run the program and...

In the video we can see some obvious binding of the lead screw. The stepper stalls in the same place in the rotation which indicates that your lead screw or shaft alignment is not straight. Using a...

Using chrome plated plastic for molds with high surface quality is nothing new. When I was a kid, I used chrome plated plastic parts from models and reflectors from flashlights as molds to make more....