I was running a test piece from Vector Art 3D machining. It is the fleur d'li. The first roughing pass went fine. During the second pass, the stepper motors seemed to stall for about 2 seconds and then the job continued without intervention but shifted about 2 inches right and down (Y-axis). The Z axis seemed to be fine.

I am running a Xylotex 3 axis system with 269 oz motors. The motor speed has been cut back to around 50 ipm and the acceleration is not agressive. I used less than 8 ft long shielded cables to the motors. The spindle is a Porter Cable 690 series.

I am running a 750 mhz Dell Laptop under win 2k. It is a clean machine dedicated to running the Router. I am running a licensed version of Mach 3. I disconnected the wireless card and it has no other networking/firewall/ anti-virus software running.

I am thinking the laptop may be not enough horsepower to run the job.

Can anyone give any other suggestions?

SpookyDad,

I found that Mach 3 Dev. Version D1.90.050 with a 35000Hz Kernel Speed works the fastest and most consistently for my JGRO setup. I'm running one of Xylotex's discontinued 4-axis unipolar driver boards with scrounged HPLJ-II/III 100 oz-in stepper motors on all axis.

I tried the latest Mach 3 Dev. Version D1.90.065 and wound up with all kinds of lost steps using the same setup for the .050 build. After fiddling around with the motor tuning and other settings without any improvement, I scrapped it and went back to Version D1.90.050. After a reboot or two I was back to cutting again.


I hope this helps,

HayTay

Cut your accel by 1/2 and see if that helps. If not, it may be the PC