axis's going wacky

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ageeironworks
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axis's going wacky

Post by ageeironworks »

we have an older cnc plasma with mach 3 thats been running great for years, we just took it all down and moved it to a new location and we are getting intermittent operation of the axis's . It seams like Y+ and X+ work every time, Z up and down work sometimes and X- and Y- are all over the place. we have checked and rechecked all the wiring and plugins, all are right, also the home limits arent working anymore....is this a Mach problem?
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acourtjester
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Re: axis's going wacky

Post by acourtjester »

To check if your wiring is correct you can use the keyboard arrow keys and the page up and page down keys. Left arrow should move X to the negative and right moves X positive. Down arrow moves Y negative and up arrow moves Y positive. Page down moves Z down and page up moves Z up. This will verify you have the drivers connected to the correct axis. If they are wrong motor tune is not hooked to the axis it should be and this will cause them to act funny. Intermittent movement is usually a wiring problem/bad connection.
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tcaudle
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Re: axis's going wacky

Post by tcaudle »

The key words here are "took it all down and moved it". Anytime we have to troubleshoot a system the first thing we ask is: was it working? what happened between when it was and when it stopped? Almost without exception the answer is "noting changed". The Support guys have been trained to probe and ask if its been moved or if any of the wiring unplugged or rerun. Amazingly users do not consider unplugging stuff moving it and plugging it back in to be a "change". In almost all of those cases it ends up being a plug or wire (connection) If the unit was not handled carefully stuff can happen Just (now) got off the phone with a young man in panic mode because nothing was working right and after 20 minutes I got him calm enough to answer if the unit had been moved or cables redone and he said "well, we had to move the table because of flooding but we hooked everything back like it should be" So always troubleshoot to the last time it worked and what changed , no matter how unimportant it might seem. If its an older MACH system that uses the parallel port you can have a cable not seated well (25 pin ot the PC and I have seen a pin get bent , cables get run over by wheels, and one more than one occasion the Parallel port card get loose inside the PC . DB25 cables can look plugged in and not be completely seated so on eor more pins is not making good contact. The pins in the cable involved are the same ones in the Motor Outputs in MACH.
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