Hello, I have the elite Journeyman running great and now I am trying to setup the revolution and am seeing a Soft alarm on Z. I already rounded the piece of wood in my lathe so I am just trying to start the rough out tool path. Since it is five inches round, I had to add two additional spacers to lift the gantry above the piece of wood. With that, do I need to change my z axis limit? If so, how do I do that? Or is there another setting that isn’t correct? FYI, I use vcarve pro with the diameter of the wood as 5 inches and z zero position as cylinder access.
I’m assuming you are using the tool setter on the headstock?
Try manually setting Zzero with piece of paper from the cylinder surface
Then run the program if it works then it’s in the tool setter settings if not check your Z clearance in the software
A soft alarm typically means that your parameters are set outside your work area. As you mentioned, you do need to change your Z limit in the software. This happened to me when I first started to use the rotary, but I use Carveco, so the setup is a little different. However, in the software, when programming the passes, there are two sections called “Rapid Z Gaps above Material” and “Z Gaps above Material” that represent the distance between your bit and the work area. If it is too high, your spindle is trying to move too far above its range, which is causing a soft alarm (most likely). Try changing both to no bigger than a 1/4 inch, so like .2 inches. Also, the rotary probe sets your work area up initially, X, Y, Z. Still, you have to zero out your Z on the material, so use the probe on the rotary, tell your machine to go to the work place origin should be right above your work area and lower the spindle so the bit is just barely above the surface of the work piece. Use the paper method: a single piece of paper should slide between the bit and the wood, zero your Z on the controller, and you should be good to go. Good luck.
Oh! I think you are right. Let me try that. I set the z gaps to 1 inch without thinking of the consequences. I did that because I had a bobscnc revolution and it was always cutting into my piece of work. I think it had other problems and was never able to get a good cut.