Thanks for the feedback everyone. I have fixed my problem! It was difficult to track down, but now that it’s solved, it seems like a no-brainer. STATIC discharging from my UNGROUNDED dust collection system was probably the issue. Another big clue was that my machine would cut out at “random” times. It’s not actually that random though. It would carve 5,000 lines of code, and then alarm. I would then fiddle with it, and then restart the carve in the same place. It would “air carve” for those first 5,000 lines (no contact with the piece; no dust), and then within the next few thousand lines it would stop and alarm. I could air carve no problem and with the spindle running. I hooked up the dust collection and I’d have a problem. So, I screwed a small wire to the plastic end piece of the dust hose, soldered it to the copper spiral core in the dust hose, and then ran a copper wire along the dust collection PVC pipe all the way to the outlet ground.
I also connected a ground line from the metal router body to a new power cord that has a ground plugged in. This is temporary until I have time to rewire the Dewalt. But honestly, I’d rather not drill into the Dewalt in case I use it one day without the XCarve. Thanks to the two following posts for closing the loop on my troubleshooting and confirmation of my issues:
Pictures of my project to come soon. AKA, what was the big deal about the long code!
EDIT: By the way, I live Tucson, AZ and the humidity here is just about always less than 15-20%. I wonder if my machine was alarming out SOONER (10% into a job) rather than later into a job that was almost finished. For that, I guess I’m lucky that I could see the problem faster.