Hello,
I did a search on Google for this particular fault and I saw this thread so thought I would bring this topic back to life with my experience. I joined here a while back but this is my first post as I have mainly used this forum for reading purposes. Our company has a Pacer 25/12HDS machine and it is now in its tenth year of service. Last week our Pacer machine came up with an error on start up. This basically stops the machine from talking to the computer at the control terminal completely. You can not seek datums, do any tool sets or even move the saddle up and down the machine. The message read:
This is the first time in 10 years we have experienced this fault. The machine has been pretty problematic in its time with wires wearing out underneath the saddle and spindle issues. I've sent many 'Error Report Support Disk Files' to them over the years and to be fair a chap called Andrew has always been helpful on the phone when you finally get hold of him. We had heard on the grapevine that AXYZ formerly Pacer were now charging for technical support over the phone, but we had never been asked to pay in all these years. Last Thursday we phoned AXYZ to discuss this dongle fault and we were in fact asked to pay £195 for a years Technical support for the first time. With production here on stop it was a lot cheaper than my hourly rate. We paid and then were told this particular problem could be either the dongle had broken, or the software had corrupted. Either way it would be costly.
Now Monday morning we contacted AXYZ again for further help and to discuss costs for fixing it and they informed us they couldn't open out Support Disk. Why they couldn't tell us that on Thursday of last week we do not know. My boss complained to their Operations manager this morning about the poor help we have received and the response was they were waiting for our £195 payment to clear! What a poor response and it did occur to me that perhaps this company are in trouble financially?
This story does have a happy ending though. We've bought a Maxicam M3 CNC machine as a replacement and a guy there tipped us off that they had an ex-Pacer engineer working for them. He works in Nottingham for
'Black and White CNC services'. His name is
Shaun Broad and fixed our issue in under 5 minutes. We had to fiddle slightly with our regedit file which he talked us through and it was problem solved. We are back up and running now and AXYZ have since phoned and asked us to send another Support disk. We've let them know what we think of them and their poor response time. I get the impression they would have made the problem sound more complicated than it actually was just to get more money out of us.
Just thought I would share that experience with the rest of the CNC community and hope I haven't broken any rules recommending an alternative company. If others are experiencing this same error message on start up, it could well be a very simple fix. Hope this is helpful