Firstly Thanks and apologies to you all…

Here’s why…

I said I had Checked Calibration and the machine moves 20mm physically when moved/jogged 20mm on the screen for mach3. Ok well that was true however only to my steel ruler and in a rushing over enthusiastic way.

I also said I had checked my Tool settings in my drawing, well that is true also but I hadn’t set the Stepdown/pass’s correctly and the two 5mm pass’s used to cut the part in my first post was basically me pushing a weak machine to fast and to hard perhaps?

So I read over what you have all been posting and sending me via email, along the way I picked up a few things I really needed to look at properly, mainly calibration and backlash.

In all the excitement to getting my machine “up and running” these are both things I didn’t really give much attention to and for that I’m sorry for taking up everyone’s time but in away everyone helped because it made me step back and take a proper look at everything.

It didn’t help that my digital calliper went flat on me last week (the battery!), what I have now basically done is run calibration tests on each axis, it turns out the machine was out in all 3 axis’s .

So I got everything down on paper, when I run the Axis Calibration it kept setting up my Y axis to some really odd settings I don’t know why because the X and Z it didn’t seem to have a problem with as they both got the same settings assigned to them from mach, then I read up about how to adjust for backlash and then proceed to setup mach to account for the backlash on all 3 axis's.

My calliper is only a cheap one so working in mm I have only got 0.0 on the actual readout display of the calliper, anyway I did the above and I now seem to be spot on in all 3 axis’s, I went 100mm on all 3 axis’s however I only did this in 1 direction on each, dose that matter? I know you said to go to atleast 200-250mm but my calliper will only goto 155mm .

Once I was happy that I wasn’t going to get it much better, I drew out (using a marker) a number of different size boxes, I then checked they were to the right sizes and square.

Once I did that I then tried cutting the part in my first post again, only this time I only stepped down on each pass 1mm at a time and I just made 2-3 passes.

When I checked the sizes of the part I was still out 1mm here, ½ a millimetre there and it wasn’t quite right. I then went back to the forums and read some of your new posts, the one by AlexBanich who said:

I'm wondering if you’re not losing position under load like captain resonator has mentioned. You would think though if that were the situation though you'd not have a uniform error.

Well I then pulled out one of the very first drawings I did on a bit of chipboard, I looked at the sizes and to my surprise they were quite close (if only I had calliper, when I drew it out!).

I then started to question if I was losing position under cutting load. So I put it to the test but this time I only did ½ a millimetre pass’s.

While there was room for improvement it was the best it had been so far!

So, I then did it again, this time I tweaked my spindle speed so that I wasn’t getting any smoke from the cutter but the speed was enough that everything was still running/cutting smoothly. In the picture below you can see what the result was:



all checks done on sizes and we have a WINNER!, fair enough my calliper is only cheap so I can’t really say its spot on.

So to sum up:

I wasn’t accurate enough in my so called original “calibration”.
I learnt that the Steps per settings need to be calculated properly.
That Backlash compensation is your friend when you want to start really fine tuning the calibration, so use it Lee!

The other thing that I have also discovered is that quite frankly my Rockcliff is really sensitive when under load, if I try to make passes above ½ a millimetre; the results are no good/wrong.

I used 12 1/2mm round rail and mdf for the build and because of this the machine is weak? Fragile? I don’t know what the best description is.

So ill do some more cutting and work out what is best or what my sweet spot is so to speak but it’s not going to be great in terms of how fast I can machine parts but I’ve walked away with some more knowledge and better understanding of what I’m dealing with so I guess that’s great.

I think there is a few other things I can do to help give the machine a fighting chance, the cutter I have been using is a 3mm, 3 Flute End Mill it cost about £1 from Hong Kong and it now looks like it’s been thro the war.

I’ve got myself some dormer ends mills and I’m thinking about coming down in cutter diameter to see if that helps at all. So time will tell!

The problem I seem to have now is, when the machine is running it seems to cut about 35mm then pause's for a second, then starts off again.

It dose another 35mm, then another pause, and it does this until the job done. Is this right?

It only seems to have started doing it since I setup backlash adjustment on mach. I wouldn’t mind but when it starts to take off again its actually that sensitive the cutter is moving off line as it starts to cut into the material again, this is now also giving a discrepancy In the cut part, hopefully you can see what I mean in the pick below:





I will update again later tonight with a video of the machine cutting so you can see what is going on.

Again, Thanks for all your input guys your suggestions all helped me along the way to finding the “answers” and for that I’m very much grateful.

Ok its now gone 2:30am and its time for bed, catch up with you all later.

Cheers,