Hi All,
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A quick text update and a shout out for a supplier (no I am not on commission, but credit where due):
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I have today rigged up a new compressor to my airbrush/mister solution and its a 50L Sealey unit SAC5030VE, which was posted in another thread - this thing is a breath of fresh air (pun intended) and with a blow gun will help considerably with chip clearance, which was one of my previous bugbears. Props go out to Sprayguns Direct, who I dealt with directly off of their website rather than their ebay shop and they delivered quickly and gave good comms/phone calls/emails throughout and threw in a more expensive blow gun in place of the one I ordered which they didn't have in stock...so credit where its due and we'll see how it handles long term usage.
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I have also got suspicious of the ZPA5-INT controller being a cause of some missed steps and other idiosyncrasies, so took a punt on an Optoport V3, which I'm hoping will be more reliable and I've literally just finished wiring this into my control box. Couple of differences on that board I hopefully haven't fallen foul of are that it needs a 15-70V power source, so have taken a feed off of my main transformer (68V) and also it only has one Enable connector which is wired to all the drivers in parallel and also doesn't have any pins associated with it. I have therefore disabled all the enable pins in MACH3 and redone all the pin mappings for the Step and Dir Outputs. I'll test this tomorrow and feedback on results and see if it is any better.
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Oh in my other post I alluded to ballscrew misalignment and finally tracked down an issue on my original X Axis ballscrew, which has been there since I originally put the machine together i.e. a piece of extrusion in the hole on the gantry sides, which whilst not preventing that ballscrew turning, was causing some binding - it now turns freely and smoothly by hand so should be much better generally.
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I am also about to rectify any inaccuracies in my manually marked, cut and drilled Z Axis, by machining two new plates, whilst at the same time replacing the old and probably "weak" spindle mount plates with one of those linear bearing blocks, which have the 80mm bore once the bearing unit is removed (can't believe how cheap that was compared to some components).
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Anyway more posts, pics and vids inbound once the machine is running again and cutting stuff.....
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Chris