Ballscrew pre-tension

[A_Camera]

I don´t have any real pic handy at the moment but hope this cad model will help. It´s incomplete but the ballscrew are running on either side of the 100x100 steel beams.

The critical speed for 1610 should be about 1000rpm (using a root diameter of 14mm) and although the machine runs nicely at about 4m/min cutting speed, the motors stall every now and again if doing rapids at more than 4m/min.




I feel the ballscrews are quite long and I´ve read pre-tensioning them slightly might help...would like to give a try.

Hi,
Perhaps you need to increase the driver voltage, perhaps the PSU current is not enough. What sort of power supply are you using? Switched supplies are not as good as analogue supplies because they don't like sudden power surges, and rapid moves require sudden change in current usage. Also, perhaps you have too high acceleration. Try setting it lower and see if that helps increasing the speed.

Another thing which came to my mind is the drivers and the micro stepping. What sort of drivers are you using and at which micro stepping? Also, more motor data is necessary to be able to say if 40V is enough or not.

Anyway, I think generally speaking, 4m/min is sort of a limit for DIY moving gantry type of machines with steppers directly driving ball screws. That's why I chose to build mine with moving table instead. Also, while 1610 offers a theoretical advantage in speed over 1605, I think the advantage is lost because it also requires higher torque from the steppers, so perhaps lowering the acceleration might be a solution. I don't know which acceleration values you have now, but try half of that just to see if it helps getting up the speed, if yes then try to increase until the steppers stall and set the new value about 10% below that.

Also, I don't think that increasing ball screw tension will help, but perhaps if you fix some sort of stabilizer in the middle of it. There are different solutions, I think the best would be to have one which gets out of the way when the gantry is in the middle. Other solutions for such long screw is to replace the fixed ball screw with a rotating one, but that is more complicated.