I don't see it as being an issue from the power company because this has been over a week and the other mills have been running without a hiccup . This mill and another have been running off the same breaker for a couple years now , so I know that part of things is good
I took it apart to swap the x motor which it turned out had the wires repaired as I had previously mentioned . That would have been a few years ago . . The wires run across behind a panel where the power supply is . I took that panel off and I was gentle pulling the wires through . I connected the new x motor to the driver and left the motor resting on the table . I powered up but the driver had no power . I looked at the power supply and the positive wire was hanging . Obviously it wasn't tight and me pulling the stepper wires through was enough to knock it right off .
Now I have the possibility of it being one of 2 things , the motor is no good or the supply could have been losing connection and blowing the driver ??? . I hoped to get a reply from tormach before putting another new driver on but since I haven't heard from them I reluctantly went ahead and hooked it up .
The x motor is still sitting on the bench while the machine will air cut for the next couple hours . So far so good . If all goes ok tonite then I'll mount the motor tomorrow and cross my fingers
the mill seems to be back to normal aside from the need to put it back together . I air cut for a few hours last night and the mill is behaving
The more I think about it the loose connection at the power supply is the likely culprit . I heard a pop when one drive blew and an arc is probably what I heard . This was the first time that cover has been off so I can't even guess at how long that power wire has been loose .
I like the mx drives but they are obviously a bit overly sensitive at times . The estop blowing the unit is well known and it's possible a power flicker mid run is enough to blow them to , but who knows ??
There is a distributor who sells individual replacement boards for the axis in the mx3660/4660 . At least leadshine is wise enough to allow a customer to repair a blown axis rather than replace the whole unit . I contacted the distributor yesterday to ask if they can also source the top (breakout) board but I got no reply . I'll probably go to the horse's mouth and try leadshine usa .
Still no reply to my inquiry from tormach either as expected . I'm sure they have a short list of possibilities and I was hoping for some input because this has become a tad costly .
it's too soon to say it's a problem solved but I'm hopeful
My 12 year old1100 S3 had many under torqued wires, I went thru and tightened all the visible connections. I did have trouble with the connectors on the stepper drivers burning and discoloring, repaired those and the machine has been relatively trouble free.
mike sr
I find the connectors on my torus pro drivers break down over time . They'll fry the drivers If i don't change them out every so often . I'm guessing the 1100's get enough power at the drives to do the same ? The mx3660's haven't shown any breakdown or coloring which is good
For the most part the 440's are trouble free but it would be wise to go over everything when they arrive . I'm bad in that sense and I had them cutting as soon as they were pulled out of the crates and powered . I should set aside the time to go over all of them but I can't lie to myself because I know I won't lol
This week was a bit different and and a little frustrating . I'm still doing random air cuts to test it and tomorrow it'll be back to production . Tomorrow I need to order yet another driver to have on hand . I'll blow another at some point and it's always good to have spares rather than have a mill not running for a week or so .
I also like to keep a spindle driver and motor as well as at least one stepper on hand . The steppers are a bit unique since they have the angular contact bearings built into the motor . I'd like to find another source for them but all my web searches have failed me . They are reasonably priced from tormach so I can live with buying them through them
non related anything I've posted here but the work thats gone into this is pretty wild . Maybe a future retirement project just for fun
https://youtu.be/9gMX_hR-RoM?si=AsNsxARiane3ipar
it looks like the problem is resolved with the mill which is good because getting a new spare driver has proven to be troublesome in itself . To save a few bux I ordered from keling on ebay . The ebay global shipping to here in Canada is pretty tragic but it is much cheaper than buying from tormach . I'd buy it direct from the keling site but the site shows no shipping to Canada and it's easier to go through ebay for the same price than to contact him and have him send me an invoice . The package arrived yesterday and it was super light , so much so that I knew there was nothing but an empty box . Turns out there was something in the box and it was the male female adapter that comes with the driver . To top it off I paid dhl duties last week which shows on the tracking the payment has been made but they keep hounding me by email to pay again . They don't make it easy to talk to someone
The package weight in the tracking indicates that there was no driver in the box , so either it was never sent or someone at the global shipping depot got themselves a score . John has contacted me to call him and getting through is a bit of a problem , I'm sure he will make things right once we can talk . I've never had a problem with him in the past , nor have I read where someone has been burned so who knows where the driver landed
At least the mill is back to normal and is running great , otherwise a poor decision would have it collecting dust . I'm pretty sure that power connection was the issue , a short in the motor would have likely blown the drive board vs the main board . Either way it's got a new x motor and I shouldn't have any problems for a while , at least with that mill
new issue popped up today with pathpilot . I came to the shop to see a pile of errors on the one computer and it was in the os and not pathpilot . All the errors were dropbox not being able to connect . This one is setup to boot to the os first then I boot to pathpilot from there . It must have rebooted itself sometime through the night . Anyhow every time I tried to start pathpilot I got those errors and pathpilot would not start up .
I shut down and restarted the pc and once again it locked on the splash screen . After a lot of screwing around I got it to boot to the os then to pathpilot
Problem now is I can home x and z but getting a latch error for y . Pathpilot then goes to hell and needs to be rebooted to pull it out of being more or less crashed . I overrode the switches and homed it that way .It's running fine but something is corrupted . I have too many parts to make so I'll free up some time to do a fresh reinstall over the weekend , for now it's running .
To avoid this issue in the future I've uninstalled dropbox on all my mills , which doesn't matter since dropbox hasn't worked on any of my mills for some time now .
I'm ok with errors here and there but this occasional screen lock up is starting to piss me off