Originally Posted by
jd479
1st post to this forum.
've really been helped with all the posts with my x8-2200. I've added a 0.5" aluminum stiffener plate to the bed, used zeeflyboy's example for self contained water cooling on the gantry and added some lexan shields on the side for safety and to help contain the dust. I've used the machine for about 2 years except for the 4th axis.
Now to my problems:
The 4th axis is at the stepper end of the bed running down the Y axis. I'm using an aspire rounding tool path at 75ipm. Intermittently the Y axis loses it's home and goes off one end or the other of the work during the cut. I started at 150ipm and the problem is a more regular, but still random so I cut the feed rate in half and that helped a lot, but occasionally it still has the issue. When the problem starts, it sounds like the stepper frequency goes way up for a moment and it loses position on the Y axis. This has led to a few broken bits.
The problem appears whether the 4th axis is connected or not, and I can hear the freq change when air cutting with the spindle powered off. The g-code looks ok and many times it works for a while, and shows the problem at different line numbers. Only thing I've checked so far is the PS voltage. With the controller disconnected it sits at 42 volts, and doesn't seem adjustable. Don't know what it should be. I haven't connected a scope to it and don't know if I can capture any meaningful data since it is so intermittent.
2nd weird issue is with the Z touch off plate. It works fine until I try to use it with any g-code loaded into mach3 (latest version). Touch off then goes to the plate as normal, and Z moves up to the home switch instead of stopping at the normal few mm above the plate. This happens every time, and I have to stop and restart mach3 with no g-code loaded to be able to use the touch plate again.
It may be that the omio xml configuration file that was included with the machine is affecting this, but I'm both g-code and xml challenged, so would really like any suggestions the group can give.
Thanks
JD