That has absolutely nothing to do with the reason for this mod. This isn’t about bearing protection, it’s about repeatability and ensured alignment from one side to the other. The bearing retaining screws have come loose (or not tightened properly at the factory). It’s just a better method of ensuring repeatable and aligned homing.
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Two on each side of thy bottom. 1on left side ofx gantry.any in right side of the x gantry?
No need on right side of gantry. Machine homes to the left and the change to the soft limits will keep the machine from making contact on the right and at the back.
How have you found the repeatability? I find that there is commonly .008-.012” variance when homing even with the stops. I assume this is due to the stall homing. You are on a different controller from what I recall. You manually zero by hitting stops and then power machine off and back on?
Hey Mike, my homing is done by manually pulling the machine against the stops (and hitting the stops for Z & X as well). With the machine motors powered off, I run a ‘fake’ homing sequence on my controller, and have a push button that is connected to the home switch inputs on my controller. This serves nothing more than to zero out my machine coordinates so my soft limits will work. Once homed, I power the motors back on. To answer your question about repeatability, I honestly never checked it or suspected I had any reason to. It’s something I may look into now that you’ve mentioned it though.
I can imagine you are probably correct with the variance due to the stall homing, but I’m surprised there’s that much variation.
I haven’t done anything terribly scientific. I’ve just been writing down coordinates between pieces after homing and zeroing with probe. Have noticed it’s pretty common to see 0.2mm-0.3mm difference in zeroed coordinates. I use a fixed square plate and a precision piece of round for the bit for zeroing so I would think the only way I’m getting this variance is due to homing differences.
For me it’s not a big deal, I don’t do much metal work and none that I would be charging people for. For wood I’m not going to worry about a variance that small likely going to move that much after cutting anyways.
Does this even impact accuracy? I doubt it just repeatability if using fixtures with programmed WCS.
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Mike, are you saying that you’re homing between work pieces, like every time you take a finished piece off the table & put a new workpiece on? Homing is resetting the machine zero, so that amount of variation is not surprising. It shouldn’t really affect workpiece accuracy, just the zeroed start point of the workpiece.
I’m referring to between power ups. I’ve got a fixture in place at bottom left. Power up machine home, zero piece with probe and am getting these variances. Agreed for single pieces not likely ever a big concern.
I have a job coming up that I need to make 15 different signs. It would be nice if I could setup 4 fixtures and use different WCS for each. In turn it would be nice to be able to write a gcode file to run to set the WCS at startup with G10 P1 L2 etc. For this type of job probably not a big deal to have .008-.012” variance but can see how this could be problematic for other tasks if trying to use WCS for fixtures.
Is that a crack I can see?
Here? I don’t know… sort of looks like one though.
No it’s just a bit of dust.
Looks like a crack to me. Use a magnifying glass to check it out.