I went out to the CNC this morning, all ready to get down to cutting. I had a test pattern to cut, and a scaled-down version of my nemesis, The Pumpkin, too.
So of course I spent the whole day tweaking and tuning the machine, before I was able to even try to cut anything.
I began by installing the motor cables in the wire loom I’d picked up last night, then re-attaching the cable runs to the machine. I ended up changing where the wires run, as the X-axis home switch was acting flaky. That turned out not to solve the flakiness problem, but I like the new wire run anyway.
I had a problem with the Y bearings popping off of the rails (I really need to replace the Y-axis rails, as I bought them the wrong length), so I re-drilled some holes in the rails to make them line up better, and re-installed the bearings.
I homed the machine and prepared to set my soft limits properly, and started running into problems because of the flaky X-axis home switch. I had to turn off all the limit switches in Mach 3, because kept firing and causing an E-stop.
I figured out that the table has physical limits at 103.25″ in X and 49.25″ in Y. So I set up the soft limits to these values. The Z-axis has 5.75″ of motion with the current endmill, but this will naturally change with each bit.
Now that I knew where the table limits are, I set about laying down the spoilboard. I placed it at X=0.5″, Y=1″, so that I didn’t run into the flaky home switch.
Then I placed a workpiece, and set the tool offset to suit (I set G54 to 4,4,-4). At this point, I was ready to do a cut.
I decided to “air cut” the first time, to make sure that everything was going OK.
And, in short, it’s not.
The router didn’t start up and stop correctly. I was getting some kind of “motor startup failure” message on the Super-PID screen. So I spent a little time trying to diagnose that problem, and noticed that the sensor was not giving a full on/off signal; it was going from fully white to only about halfway black. I don’t know why.
So, the CNC is ready to cut, but I have one last bug to kill. I’m glad that I got a chance to give it a really nice going-over; I think that it’s pretty much ready to roll once I can get the router on/off working.