First Build 5 x 12 Steel Frame CNC router

[Scott Damman]

I have seen dust collection but your blasted me from my chair If thats not OTT, i dont know what is. May be what once i have seen the whole spindle in the dust tract.

Boyan, thanks I think it might be a little much and also Im not real sure how it will work but I run 6inch to all my machines and have a 10hp cyclone dust collection system so I thought it would be better to have 2 4 inch tubes down to the bit rather than just one 6 inch. I will make an update on how it works once its all hooked up and the dust shoe is made/installed.

Thanks for the comments on the ballscrew/nut the sound just didnt sound great but like I said I havent ever been close up to a machine. Of course once it is cutting those sounds cant be heard.

So I decided to make a temporary spindle cooling fan adapter and get this thing cutting. So the first thing I wanted/needed to make is the dust collection adapter mold.


Heres the machine cutting for the first time.



Turned out pretty good for the first cuts, here is a final picture and the first 1/2 of the dust collection adapter laid up in fiberglass.



I learned a few things on my machine, first one was not to difficult, I needed a better tune on the Z axis. I think you can see in the movie that the Z actually moved up and down slightly through its pass, for this part it didnt really matter so I let it run and played with the tuning a bunch more and I think I get it pretty good.

The other thing is I was making ellipses instead of circles. Again this part didnt matter that much so I let it run to look into it after. So after confirming gantry to X squareness I started looking into what else it could be.

Heres what I found and looking for a little help on this, I also want to say that I really appreciate all the help the experts on this forum give and I hope this build helps others with theirs..

I put the machine on a 10 inch X movement back and forth at a moderate speed, while watching the gantry I could see a noticeable racking of the gantry. Upon stopping, the gantry comes back to square. It looks like to me that X axis slave motor/ballscrew is noticeably slower at starting. I tried to use the motor delay setting in Mach, I moved the milliseconds up (delaying the master motor since the slave seemed slower) but I could not see a noticeable change. So for all of the experts out there, is the motor delay something I should be adjusting? Or is there something else I should look into? I have confirmed all the settings in Mach on both motors are the same. I also confirmed the settings in the servo drives are the same. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks
Scott

EDIT
I just looked closer at the delay, I had assumed that it was a signal delay, but as the manual says (which I should have looked at first) the motor delay is for delaying the enable signal for that output. So now I really dont know what to do.

The reason I say the slave axis seems delayed is the gantry racks as if the master motor is the only one driving it. I thought maybe the slave motor was/is not running but the fact that the gantry gets to square when it stops I think tells me the slave servo is running (resolver is bringing the system back to correct position). The servo drives output for speed match when running as well. Hope there is a good way to adjust for this delay?