pulley ratios on 3 pulley axis

[Jonathan]

PS

Give EMC2 a try, you WILL (look into my eyes not around my eyes) like it better that Mach3 me thinks

I will ... I remember reading JohnS saying that you can't jog the machine whilst in feed hold with EMC? If that's still the case then that alone is probably enough to stop me using it again as it will make tool changes more difficult. That's the only reason really I haven't already used it extensively. I'm not put off with it using Linux as I do use Ubuntu for occasionally. The GUI is much nicer in EMC, in my opinion there's too much eye-candy in mach3.

Forgot to say in last post ... don't just test the feedrate by jogging. The worst case is probably when the X-axis changes direction rapidly. So for instance try something like this:

G0 X100
G0 X0
G0 X100
G0 X0
etc

(and since EMC does support loops in Gcode you can do that much more efficiently than in mach3! I remember once spending a while writing the Gcode to do pulleys using loops and stuff only to realise mach3 does not easily support conditional Gcode). Also make it move the Y and Z at the same time as you're testing X as the extra load on the power supply will make a difference. It has on my machine ... I connected oscilloscope to the power supply recently and that showed the ripple increase markedly when all the steppers were running.

i am glad to see that you have come a long way since you started Jonathan and thanks for the help

No worries...yes I have learnt a fair bit since starting my router. If you compare what it looked like in the first post of my build log to now there's quite a difference! A lot of that was down to trying to cut costs though.