As you can see from the images, the machine seems to be jumping around as it makes its way across the top of my cut (Basically cutting a square). This does not seem to happen on the left, bottom and right edges (those cuts were actually really nice!). The bit i’m using is a 1/4" spiraling mortising bit from Harbor Freight (See link)
One theory for why this might be happening is a combination of the bit i’m using, the direction the router is moving in this section, and the direction the router is spinning. The current thought is that the bit may be an upcut bit and could be “grabbing” the material with every rotation more than if it were a down cut bit. Furthermore, I’m wondering if the router is spinning opposite the direction of travel and this is also contributing to this issue. An additional piece of information that may be handy is that I didn’t realize i’d set my depth per pass to be 0.01" rather than the 0.1" I’d originally intended for the cut to be. Could this be contributing to my issue also? Can anyone comment on this and see if I’m in the ball park with my assumptions and what the potential fix is?
Another issue I have (I’m hoping @bar may be able to comment on this) is that after after stopping the cut and removing the router, I attempted to do a hard reset on the machine so that I could retract all the belts. All the belts retracted except for one and after multiple attempts of hard resetting the machine and plugging in/unpluggings the connections on that encoder, nothing seemed to want to respond (See picture below)
Finally my last question is how can I stop a cut midway and rehome all the axes to basically start over? I have found that I am unable to do this very effectively by hitting the stop button on the GUI, and I end up having to hard reset the machine, retract all the belts, reinstall the machine, and then rehome it. Can anyone provide any information on this? I feel like it shouldn’t be this difficult.
Do all four of the belts seem tight? Do they seem overly tight like they are fighting eachother?
I don’t think so, if the cut was too deep you might see something like that, but at 0.01 I wouldn’t expect the router bit to really be interacting with the wood much at all.
You can either increase the retraction force in settings or extend that belt again and retract it. Generally when that happens it just means the belt is wound a little funny on the spool and unrolling it and rolling it back up will fix it.
The pause button should let you resume a cut, but after pressing stop you do have to start over. It would be awesome if there was a way to start a file in the middle, but the tricky thing is that gcode relies on information in earlier lines so starting in the middle doesn’t always work right.
Thanks for your responses. Please see my responses below to your questions in the order they were asked:
All 4 belts seamed “tight”, to what extent they needed to be tight I’m not sure. Should it be tight like a guitar string or should there be some “play” in the belt? Do I need to increase the retraction force potentially? If so, how much? Not sure on how this value scales when changing it.
My reason for mentioning the shallow depth is perhaps having it cut deeper would keep the bit from bouncing around as much?
Thanks for letting me know this! I’ll try it.
Interestingly when I hit stop my machine doesn’t seem to respond. Pause and play are really the only commands that work consistently, not sure why Stop doesn’t actually seem to do anything. As for my question, my thought would be that if you hit stop, it would be nice if the machine would basically cancel the remaining G-Code file, rehome the Z-Axis, and then move the machine back to your original home position on your cutting surface to then be ready for the next file input. In essence, to your point, it does “Start Over” but not to the extent of a physical hard reset that would require diassembly/reassembly of the machine to the frame. Is this possible to incorporate?
They should be reasonably tight, but they don’t need to be guitar string tight. If you can get a video of it in action we can probably better deduce what is going on.
Maybe, but this seems like an issue with how the machine is moving to me.
Absolutely! It’s a little tricky because the firmware is built on FluidNC and FluidNC handles stops in a bit of a weird way so it’s tricky to get everything playing nicely. I kinda thought we actually already got that worked out, but I’ll have to double check what it’s doing.
I’ve definitely seen the same thing happen, and agree that “Stop” canceling and rehoming would be awesome. Had a cut last night where the Z didn’t set right (I was on my phone and for some reason it didn’t go through). The cut then dragged through the wood between cuts. Had to turn it all off, get the Z up above the material, then restart the whole retract and extend process.
@Bar I attempted to Extend all the belts and then retract them per your original instructions to me regarding the one belt not fully retracting back into the Maslow. Upon extending the belts fully and then retracting them back, this belt (pictured below) is now no longer even retracting at all and is completely stuck in an extended position. Weird that it extended the belt fine but will no longer retract. Thoughts? Bad Encoder? Board issue? Not sure. Thanks!
If it won’t move at all then there’s a chance the belt could have jammed up in the gears of the arm. I had that happen last week and had to take the affected arm completely apart to get it unstuck. It shredded some of the teeth on the belt, but still seems to be working well enough regardless.
The easiest thing to do is increase the retraction force in the settings which will probably make that arm retract, but if that doesn’t do it I agree with the folks who are saying that there is probably something jammed in that arm which is preventing it from spinning.
@Bar what is an adequate increment to step up the retraction force? Not sure
how much is too much, if there even is too much.
past advice has been to bump it up 200 or so at a time, up to 2500 or so
when you are cutting, it alerts if it hits 4000, so I think that’s a bit
conservative.
you want to minimize belt stretch and make sure that you aren’t flexing the
frame (and increase the calibration force as well when you are done)
in many cases, extending and retracting a few times wears whatever is causing
the retraction problems enough that you can lower the retraction forces again.
