How can I learn about adjusting the “pots”? I know nothing about this or even where they are. Thank you, Mike Rags
On the g shield there are 3 white blocks with what look like phillips head screws on them these are the “pots” or potentiometers. One for each axis.
Very slight adjustments are all you should make until the desired result is achieved since they are fragile and only have about 270 degrees of total rotation ALMOST NO “FORCE” IS NEEDED.
in making adjustments,for example turn the pot in for the axis in question from 12:00 to the 1:00 position and try the axis again.
Really simple but intimidating if you have never done this sort of thiing before. It’s a learning experience.
Set the depths of cut to 1 mm, and set the depth per pass to 0.01 mm ( this will be rounded to 0.0). This way your Z will stay the same and the cut will go on “forever” and your pen wont be crushed.
I was having the same problems till I realized DUST! A small amount of dust on the rails or v rollers will throw the x carve off track. Clean the wheels and rails off and set up good dust collection. Mine hasn’t gone off track since I realized the importance of the machine staying clean.
Hope this helps
Ryan
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I’ve also noted that there is some kind of grey residue building up on the wheels, and I’ve tried to remove it. But since I can carve (with a pen) perfectly UNTIL I turn on the spindle. Then it starts creeping. The spindle is to be sent back.
There is NO possibility is problem is dust. Disconnect the spindle, DUCT TAPE a sharpie to the thing and draw it on paper. I am pretty sure it is that D$#% spindle.
Russ, I know that this is an older post, but I didn’t see a solution in this thread, and I wanted to mention that I had this issue at one point, and I discovered that the default spindle that is connected to the PWM port on the controller was feeding electrical noise back into the controller, causing the controller to randomly inject extra pulses into both the X and Y axes stepper motors. Mine started after the spindle brushes started to wear just a bit after a few weeks of usage.
You can test this by turning on the spindle without a job running and watching it for a minute or two. When mine was having this issue, you could see the spindle slowly ticking in one direction or the other on each axis, and you could see that the stepper motors were in fact turning little by little without any g-code input.
My solution, which may not be terribly convenient for you, was to disconnect that spindle and replace it with a Dewalt DW660, which plugs strait into a wall socket instead of your controller. Since I did this over a year ago, I have never once had my router go off track like that.