[bbuonomo]

Our Tormach PCNC 1100 has been running perfectly for three years. It gets intermittent use by the High School automotive lab, engineering class and robotics team.

The other day while machining the machine would estop at every quadrant while machining a circle. Yesterday the machine started to estop every time the spindle is turned on. The system with "mill" with the spindle turned off and no estop occurs to halt the program running.

But as soon as you try to turn the spindle on manually or through software the estop halt occurs.

I have tried: rebooting PC and CNC, different programs, programs generated by wizard (to make sure it is not a g code or m code error). I can jog the system through MDI without generating an estop halt.

Any ideas on how I can trouble shoot this?

Thank you in advance.

Brian

[Phishaholic]

Brian
The first thing I would check is for loose wires at all of the terminals on the main control board. Intermittent connections can cause things like that.

Larry O

[zephyr9900]

Brian, that sounds like it could be electrical noise triggering the false estop. The first thing I would do (with the machine unpowered) is to go in the electrical cabinet and wiggle and reseat all the ribbon cables at the PC boards and check the tightness of all the wires in the screw terminals. If there is a ground loose it could be causing an unexpected return path which triggers the estop.

EDIT: Great minds and all that, Larry... We must have been typing at the same time...

Randy

[rowbare]

It could be a lot of things but one quick thing to check is the motor cover switch/latch. If the cover is loose it could trigger the switch on a direction change.

bob

[bbuonomo]

First I'd like to start with. TORMACH TECH SUPPORT IS GREAT. No wait time, got a tech on the phone as soon as I pressed "2" for tech support. Techs have been very helpful in giving me steps to troubleshoot.

BUT, I'm still working on issue.

Thanks for those suggestions, I should have listed everything that i tried so far.

- I verified that all axis limit switches are working in the DIAGNOSTICS PANEL.
- This afternoon I checked the cables in the computer cabinet and the back of the machine. (I will recheck inside the control box in the morning).
- My parallel cable has the ferrite core to help with electrical noise (suggestion from TORMACH tech support).
- Machine can HOME all axis.
- Machine can JOG all axis.
- Spindle door switch operate properly. Did not notice any loose connections, but will recheck anyway.
- machine will run gcode if spindle is turned off. (just difficult to machine that way :-)

- ESTOP happens with the following situations:
--Manual start of spindle
--Automatic start of spindle (via mach3)
--Automatic start of coolant (via mach3. Manual coolant start does not trip ESTOP)

My next steps are to:
1. update MACH 3 from the PCNC update.
2. Try a different parallel cable
3. Try a different computer.
4. Send the control board back to Tormach for inspection, repair or new board.

Any other troubleshooting steps are greatly appreciated. CNCZONE has saved me tons of time and provided much needed help in the past, so I'm willing to try everything.

[Spiffy Lab]

bbuonomo, did you ever find a fix for this?

[Al_The_Man]

Sounds to me like improper grounding and equi-potential bonding of the machine, including the spindle.
But a legacy post at this time.
Al.

[matteo_galet]

Can I suggest checking that your program doesn't hit limit switches?

[tmarks11]

EDIT: we are troubleshooting a problem from 4.5 years ago.

Hopefully it is fixed by now or the OP has found a different machine.

Since he hasn't posted since the above posts in Feb 2012, I think this thread is dead.

[Al_The_Man]

The issue that post #6 appears to refer to, can happen just auto or manual start of the spindle and auto start of the coolant, which appears to me to be noise induced.
Al.