Mach 3 behaving badly?

[Davek0974]

Setup - Manual Bridgeport mill converted to CNC with Mach3, CSMIP-IP/A controller, Servo's on all axes, ballscrews etc.

Todays mess - 30 minute job takes over 3 hours.

Simple job - two setups, total of 5 tool changes, 8mm thick motor mount/adaptor plate for my new drive motor, basically a 250mm circle with 110mm hole in the middle, plus some bolt holes, tabs etc. A nice fun part to play with?

First tool/pass goes well, then the Z gets the command to go home for tool change - this triggers a (soft) limit switch, right on the tool change. Reset pressed, tool changed, Z ref is now wrong, reset, pass runs ok, tool-change time - (soft) limit triggers again, same routine.

Offsets look odd but maybe correct, i haven't figured out the numbers yet - pictures below.

The screen tells me max-z is something like 220mm? A bit tricky as i only have something like 130mm to play with? Surely my Z-Max has to be Zero?

Then i start a run and as soon as it hits the first X/Y G1 line it throws an ePid fault, and again, reset, swear, go indoors and re-cam the part for a single tool in the file and it runs OK ?

Its just winding me up something terrible as I am not 'fiddling' with stuff or editing macros etc, I just went out, booted up and tried to do some work. I have no idea what to fix or what to post up here so other can chime in but boy is it pissing me off.

It also suffers the bug where you get the "Script compile error in M3.m1s" - this seems pretty common on the 'net but again a real PITA.

I'm new to CNC relatively and having to double-check everything so i don't crash the machine is one thing but when it does not do what its told it makes things really uncomfortable ;)