By pure luck i have managed to find some rather nice (and expensive Balluff Brand) Proximity Sensors in my brothers shed (He is the maintenance guy at work), he only had 4, which is ok as it means i am able to the machine homed, and perform some more tests, and actually - im not sure that i even to have Max Limit Switches? There is a Software Travel Limit that is defined and seems to work very well, im not sure if these get ignored when running a program so i will have to check that out.

However now i can only seem to get the Z Axis to move in one direction, i was thinking that it must be a loose / funny connection somewhere since i had been tidying all of the wiring up. However if there was a problem with the wiring would the Stepper even move in one direction at all?

I was also curious as to how the Axis should be orientated, currently the X (my longest Axis) and the Y both home to minimum - Position 0, and then move positively through the co-ordinates- for example 0 -> 1010mm. However i know that our big machines move negatively, eg: 0mm -> -3000. Is there a standard way of setting this out? What are the implications, do they just affect how you need to setup any post processing configuration from SolidCAM, Fusion etc?

Im also curious about how the Z Axis is orientated too, when moving positively it travels upwards - the homing is set to minimum but when homing it searches upwards. Possibly this is because of the problems i am having with the Axis.

Thanks

Alex