Questions on using a moving gantry style mini-mill...

[Davek0974]

Next run went fine, apart from a boo-boo ;(

I've seen this behaviour before on the plasma table - something goes wrong, you press stop on the Mach screen, I know your supposed to press feed-hold but i wanted something between e-stop and feed-hold as the coolant failed to come on (duff relay) so i knew it would load up and break and so pressed stop.

Fixed the issue, wound the code back to the last M05 stop and set next line.

Pressed cycle start and the cutter goes down where it is and shoots off to X+ at cut speed, snapping the tool off. It should have gone back to where it started last time and re-cut the partial slot and then finished normally.

Looking at the DRO's the X machine position is off by 226mm which i think is the setting that it was stopped at so now the cut start was not X5 as it should be but X-221 or something like that.

As i said, this has happened on the plasma and as here, the only way back is scrap the part, re-home and start again. I failed to note the X/Y positions for job location so i couldn't reset it and try again.

Some sequence of events throws Mach positions into a tizzy and it shits the bed. On the plasma no harm usually but on the mill = broken tool :(

Oh well, the next part finished perfectly, no bed gouging, if anything it was running too high now - the material miked up at 2.91mm, i programmed the cuts to 2.90mm and there was still a good skin left at the base. Something seems a little variable on height setting possibly?