How do I smooth x travel before belts?

I’ve been clear through the videos and instructions, and unless I missed it… I don’t see where it explains how to/when to adjust the wheels or the makerslide if you have a non-smooth motion… the back slide has washers (video points out it’s for adjustments) and obviously the special nuts are for adjustment… but I can’t seem to get the correct combination.

So when you move the X carriage left to right, with no belts attached to the pulleys, you’re getting binding?

Loosen the eccentric nuts and see if the motion continues to bind with them loose.

Did you make sure, when you installed them, you have them in the “open” position, where the bolt is as far from the slide as possible? Ie. the hole in the nut is as far away from the slide as you can position it?

Yep, binding without belts… I tried adjusting the nuts to the open position, maybe I didn’t get them just right… I won’t be able to try again until tomorrow, and I will update… I was just hoping that there was a “ohhh the secret to adjusting that is…” kind of answer.

Thank you, I’ll give it a try in a while.

1 Like

Fun Facts #233 and #234 … The Motor on the X axis should be towards the top… The Bearings with concentric nuts will roll a whole lot better if you have washers between the bearing and the assembly. (problem fixed)

Thank you everyone.

lol I’m a man, and I’m not Jesus, and I’m not perfect, I make mistakes… I normally don’t make the same one twice though!

1 Like

Gotcha… it’s been a long time since I saw the red green show… all good though. wiring tomorrow afternoon, hopefully.

1 Like

Great. I do wish that there were way better calibration instructions… worthless calibration - > cut in easel = horrible way to do things… took me quite a bit of searching to find a video on here that showed a general way to measure how much travel I was getting vs how much I told the machine to do… it did have a helpful calculator with it.

those are the ones I ended up finding. I used the potentiometer and the stepper calibration ones. The build instructions should point to those to do calibration, instead of “tension your belts look at this other crazy complex and mostly worthless instructions” “calibration complete now click cut in easel… Oh sorry that your spindle bottomed out through your material because your z needed calibrated and was moving 25 millimeters when told to move 1”

Thank God I’m an IT Specialist and a former Electronics Technician! lol

1 Like

Up and running now… trying to figure out how to take a vectored 2d flag and add some depth to it… (make it 3d)…Aspire just isn’t doing it for me… I can get the toolpaths to vaguely cut it… but I’m looking to change depth a little more than by each vector…

I can’t believe so many kids can create amazing 3d work (thingiverse) but I, with all of my Google-fu, can’t even figure out the software to start with!

lol just been frustrated quite a bit with this…
X-Carve is great now… now it’s a matter of producing drawings I want to cut :slight_smile:

If you have vectors and want to just add a little depth…take a look at this:

2 Likes

That’s a GREAT tutorial! Thank you! Gonna try to apply this, and watch the rest of that series.

1 Like