Originally Posted by
stagen
Thanks Bob for replying and for that nice little program. Got it saved to do all 3 at the same time.
Small update. While I got my garage insulated and wired up to be usable in the coming cold days I didn’t touch the mill for a week or two. Go to start it up, press reset, and all 3 axis tried to runaway again. WTH. So I took the computer out, cleaned all the board contacts with a pencil eraser, unsoldered the old CMOS battery, checked for any noticeably bad wires, and put it back together.
Start up, reset, all 3 try to run again. Frustrating.
Replace 2 limit switches on the Y axis, and got all the packed in chips vacuumed out from under all the way covers. I had also noticed that when the runaway occurred, the axis were usually parked somewhere along the midpoint of their travels when the machine was turned on. So I wheeled them all by hand to their home switches and tried again. Reset, honed, sweet.
Still paranoid about runaways reoccurring, I would send it home before switching off, and haven’t had a problem since.
I also had a problem running a toolchange. The M06 macro program would send Z to +.0100 which would trip the positive software limit I have set to .000. After some searching I found the program and it’s path in the A:\ drive. Did I mention I’m new to DOS as well? I couldn’t figure out how to edit the file. EDIT was a bad command, I got TYPE to show me the whole text file. Then while searching online to figure out drive paths to get my floppy drive working again (didn’t reset the CMOS data) I came across a post that said you could edit files through the CNC program by using F4(any) and entering its full path. So typed A:\TC\P1-6.ATC and voila, I was able to edit the macro to z0 during the head up phase.
Theres a lot of helpful posts out there that address things not mentioned in the “Centurion V” manual I downloaded from Milltronics, but they’re scattered and take a lot of searching for. But I’m slowly figuring this thing out. Hopefully I’ll be making chips in a couple days.