Hi from the UK and advice please

[shamus13]

Hi to you all, Been looking through the site for a while now and am amazed at the knowledge and complexity of the world of CNC that I have entered. Have recently built a Rockcliff table with linear bearing and am fairly pleased with the build. I am now looking for advice and direction to allow me to do some cutting. The hardware I have is:
425 oz in (3Nm) stepper motors, 1.8 deg, 8 wire, wired in series
Drivers, max in 50vDc, max cur 4.2A, pulse fq upto 400 Khz
Power (x2) 260W, 40vDc @ 0A / 38vDC @ 7A
25 way Breakout board

Leadscrews 6mm rod with 1mm pitch

I have configured Mach 3 as per Mach guidence notes and have drivers set at 5 microsteps.

Problem I am having is that the table moves fine when jogging to a certain point but when attempting to do the actual program the motors appear to struggle and seem almost to stop making progress (? loosing steps ?). They do however still turn but at micro factions of a turn. Any ideas?

Other advice I would appreciate is how to get a jpeg, gif, bmp, etc pic to g-code?
I have at present TurboCAD learning, Wintopo and the demo of Mach 3 (1000 lines of code) Dont want to shell out for the full program till I know how to work it properly.

How also do you get the image in Mach to be central? Mine always seem in the far corner.

Again, any help would be valued as I am an utter novice at this.

Shamus

[C.Michael]

The problem with the motors stalling..are you setting up the program that would stall the motors because you are cutting too deep or fast?

Look at www.vectric.com and see what that program can do..they advertise here..you can import an image and it has a feature that will trace the image and convert it to g code with inputs from you in regards to speed and cut styles..

you need to learn what your machine is capable of cutting..you just need to experament with it..My table will rapid at 30 inches a minute but there is no way it would cut much at that speed..more like 10 to 18 inches..just depends on what you are cutting..what bit..how deep..etc...

experament with the left mouse button for the image..hold and move it to change the image position..double left click it to put it back to its original position..mouse wheel will zoom in and out..your cursor must be in the image to do all of this...Mike