I’m dealing with missed steps for the first time. I never had issues until this morning. I was having problems with circles and changed out the pinions and the belts. I’m using nema 23 too.
I have run full depth on 3/4 Baltic birch with a compression cutter on all my cabinets in my house. No problem, ever. Until this morning.
I’ve been messing with it more throughout the day. I believe that my issue was 2 things. Belts were too tight and the spring bolt idler may have been too loose.
I am running another job now that lost steps earlier today. I loosened the motors and made sure the belt could be pushed against and forced around .25 in fairly easily. Still has, seemingly, plenty of contact on gears.
I then tightened the idlers another turn and a half. Hoping this works.
I will say that I could not push anything around when motors were off until I loosened belts.
Can you turn your motors off and move the machine around by hand?
I do too. I have never had skipped steps, that were noticeable at least, until I overtightened the belts.
I think it’s trial and error at this point because somehow it was reliability set up by me a few years back and slowly got out of whack. Now I’m trying to figure out the best belt and spring bolt tightness. There didn’t seem to be a mention of it in the directions. I think an example should be put up in a video or the documentation for those of us who have not ever done this. What’s optimum and how to get there would be nice.
Looks like this was my problem exactly. Apparently I had overtightened the belt on the right side Y stepper.
Appreciate everyone’s help. Hopefully y’all can get Michealdot figured out now.
Thank you for the links. Super helpful. I’m going to go make sure it’s exactly that. I should have looked more thoroughly. Things have been hectic and I’ve been a bit frazzled about setup since replacing things.
@jezzy
I’m with you. Cutting solid hardwood is nothing like cutting metal where you can expect consistent results. Every species is different, and even from tree to tree the same species can cut very differently. I used to burn stuff all the time on the handheld router, I think because it was hard to keep it moving fast enough all the time, and I was probably too cheep to make sure my bits weren’t tossed out when they got dull. However, on the CNC I run feedrates from 30ipm to 100, usually not faster than that unless they are very light cuts, but even at 30 I have never had burning problems with very light chiploads (I do have an air nozzle pointed at the endmil/cut to clear chips though, so that probably helps). But the cut is usually a lot cleaner at the slower speeds (less scallop, chipping, chatter, vibration, etc) and I don’t like sanding and chipout so I go for quality over speed. I also don’t do cuts that are over about 40% of the diameter because it seems like it really side loads the bit and deflection and chipout and everything else increases a lot. I’m like you I start out at a speed that I think will be good, and then bump it on the mach4 screen by sound of the cut. When I’m planing off a large river table and its in the top cut or two when the depth is very uneven yet, I’m bumping up and down a lot to speed things up, but avoid bogging down.
Interesting. This one isn’t good. The side ones are similar, but are reinforced by the mounting area. This one hangs over the edge.
On the note of speeds and feeds again. Species definitely matters. Walnut seems to separate easily when too deep and works great with a down cut bit at shallow cuts. Tons of tear out when with the grain and too deep
Ash is so dense and seems to machine completely differently and I can get tiny details to show much easier than other wood.
The approach into the material with a lead in outside if possible is nice. Sometimes I have to score an edge with the bit to reduce tear out on an outside edge. Learned that while chamfering a table edge.
I don’t know how long you’ve had your setup. You will learn the sound of it when it’s going well
It does look like it should be rotated. I’ve tried and I swear it’s worse. I could bag on it with a hammer to get the tabs lower so they touch the mounting area and reinforce it.
I’ll try doing that to see if I can. It works now. Haven’t had an issue in that axis. It’s that part about to be purchased? I would buy 3
The ones on my machine are just bent steel like pictured in the newer instructions. Probably even easier to locate some angle iron and cut a 1" slice off the end, puncture it a couple times for the bolts, slot it if you’re keen on that.
Just to follow up. I tried to reverse it and the bolt isn’t long enough to reach the second hole without compressing the spring almost all the way.
When looking at the instructions that state to turn it 3 times. I found that I miss steps on the y when it’s done that much. I assume 3 times means 3, 360 degree rotations. I found that 1 and a half rotations works without being too tight. I’m keeping an eye on everything until I can trust the motion again.
