I purchased my X carve a while ago, but have had some problems mostly worked out until the machine decided to make a huge detour in the middle of a project cut. So I stopped using it for a while, and started doing some small upgrades, like dust shields for the Y rails. Designing a torsion table for it that I still need to build and other small things here and there.
However I fired it up recently are started trying to move the Y axis and it fail to move at all, I thought the belts were to tight so I removed the belts from the equation. I set the y axis to move 100 mm and the motors still started to stutter. So My next assumption was I had bad motor. So I diagnosed with one motor each side removing one or the other from the equation, the far side motor worked perfectly, the motor closest to the gshield actually had problems still. The problems were interesting, because it would spin fine with the motor was completely stationary, but when it was picked up or moved it would start siezing. So I got a new motor from Inventables, plugged in the same way and it has the same issue.
What could cause this problem. Help.
Videos of problem.
If the problems are caused by movement, wiring problems are one good source. Look at all your wiring and look for the following:
-Insulation under screw terminal
-Corrosion on wires or screw terminals
-Loose (or broken) strands not captured under a terminal
-Loose terminals
There’s a number of things that could cause a poor, intermittent, or mostly-mittent (?) connection, and the best way indication I know of is when things fail or hiccup while being moved. If just a single strand of wire isn’t captured and is occasionally touching a different terminal, it will cause problems.
If you can’t find the problem, you may want to just completely disconnect all the wires, re-twist them (and use ferrules or ring/spade terminals), then reconnect them. Sometimes it’s easier to do that then to try to find the one strand of wire that’s causing problems.
I went through this list of problems and worked out every one of them, took me a couple days to get around to it but I got it!
I also used a couple videos (I think you posted) to help calibrate the mill even further, I learned my motors were undervolted and thusly not moving.
However, I am running into an issue of not having a very accurate measuring device to calibrate the steps for the mill. Do you have any recommendations of what I should use that won’t break the bank?
I’m glad you got it figured out. I think my 600mm scale was $30 on Amazon, you can get smaller scales for less if needed. Unless you plan on doing jobs with super-high accuracy (.003") that take up most of the full width or depth of your machine, you can generally get away with something like that and a good calibrated eyeball.
Well I have a 60x60 inch work surface, I’m thinking about using a tape measure that graduates to 32nds towards the end and lining up the spindle with an inch tick mark and running it the length and calibrating that way.