What are the chances of increasing the Z axis drive speed?

My Maslow is working quite well now, except for the Z axis speed. I think I must have a router with a fine pitch on the adjuster as it takes about 3 or 4 seconds to drive each mm of depth. This really slows the cutting down whenever a Z change is needed, especially as I am cutting 36mm thick boards at the moment. With these boards I am getting scorching of the board and small cuts into the edge of the part as the router is sitting there for minutes as the Z axis drives in or out.

If I go into the firmware and increase the Z axis feedrate limit, what are the chances of it working? Does the Z axis have the same encoder sampling limitations as the X and Y axis that I have seen mentioned here?

There’s a test_electronics_firmware program in the Firmware repo that runs the motors at top speed for a short bit, in each direction. That could give you an idea about the top speed you could expect.
If you want to work with just the z axis in the program, IN3 & IN4 and ENB are the controls for that axis.

what is the feedrate of the Z axis in your gcode?

David Lang

Question to you, what did you set in GroudControl as the distance per revolution for Z and question to the rest if it would be possible to set a multiple of that? ← Edit, no not a mutible, guess in English that would be called a fraction.

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I’ve been thinking about how to handle this. The issue is that I chose a z-axis motor which is slow but powerful so it will be able to adjust pretty much any router. The trouble is that for a router with fine pitch adjustment it’s too slow and has way more torque than it needs. I will talk to our motor supplier and see if they would be willing to do a small run of motors with a different gear ratio so that we can get more speed. Thanks for letting me know this is something important to you.

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i think it’s 1000, I increased it to see if I could speed it up, but I think i hit a limit in the code.

For reference I’m using the Triton TRA001 in the UK, which is a nice router and fairly cheap. I’d definitely be interested in a motor with a different gear ratio. I’m not sure what multiple of speed would be good for my router though. Maybe 4 or 5 times the standard? Hmm, maybe that would be too fast, I’m not sure how I would pick a different rate. Maybe 2x or 3x would be a bit more conservative and still fast enough. Could we have a range of motors maybe, or a configurable gearbox?

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it’s a lot easier to run something at a lower speed, but the question is how
much torque is needed to turn the shaft.