Hi folks,
I’m wondering how fast you set your machine to make rapid moves? Mine is currently set at 800 ipm. I had an older machine that I had built using CNC Routerparts R/P drives/rails (the standard ones that used flat bars instead of linear rails) and I did rapids on that one for years at 1000 ipm with no problems. I now have a 5x10 pro machine. The default setting for this is 800 ipm, however the Avid website says 1000 ipm is possible. I had a little convo with support and I think what they said meant that they recommend 800.
I run at 900 IPM but I have Clearpath servo motors instead of the stock steppers. For most jobs rapids more than 600 IPM make little to no difference on my PRO4848. If you have up to 10’ to travel as you do it may be more of an issue but the downside of possibly loosing steps is not worth it my opinion.
It is entirely dependent on your accelleration settings. I have done laser rastering with my 48x48 at 1100 ipm (thats the feed rate!) just fine. This was on the X axis, and I have NEMA 34 steppers. However, if the accelleration was much over 125i/s^2 I’d start missing steps. At those speeds, you do have to push the accelleration harder than normal. For example, if you try to feed or rapid at 1000ipm, and you have your accelleration set at 15, it will ramp up nice and smooth, but will take a foot or two to get up to full speed. If you do rapids at very high values, and have your accellerations set high, you will likely experience a lot of vibration unless you are only using simple toolpaths without a lot of direction changes. I recommend playing around with it. Both max velocity and accelleration are in the motors settings in Mach 4 and you can just change them, and then test it out jogging and running some simple toolpaths to see what happens. If you push it too hard and start missing steps, you will hear it immediately :-). Don’t forget, whatever settings you do for your Y axis master, match it for the slave.