So I played around with it a bit last night and I have a theory for you guys to scrutinize. The encoder seems to work fine over short distances...sometimes....If i plug in the original encoder and jog the machine to a new position sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it will work for a certain distance and then bugger up. I'm wondering if the tape has reference marks (like the picture) and i have the tape installed backwards and when it gets to a reference mark it buggers everything up. I don't have a good way to solidly mount the encoder flipped so before I go make a bracket I wanted to see if this was a viable problem. for what it's worth, I don't see any reference marks on the scale.

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