I built my mostly around six weeks ago, with a work area of 500x500. So far it all went fine with soft wood, but as i switched to some other materials the last days (acrylic and aluminium sheets), i noticed that there’s some serious issue with the x and y axis losing steps. I even went down to 1/8 microsteps, driving the motors at 0.9V. But still i see ocasional stutter when trying to cut harder materials.
The feed rates are not too optimistic either, driving 500mm/min for acrylic cutting with a doc of 2mm on a 3mm 2flute downcut bit @ 12k rpm.
The belts are not overtensioned, i already played around a bit with them too. The last thing that came to my mind is that i used 40 teeth pulleys instead of the regular 16 or 20 teeth ones. Could it be that those larger pulleys somehow affect the torque in general? I ordered a pair of 20 teeth pulleys now, but would like to hear in general if other people had similar problems and if there’s any other way of improving the overall strenght.
Definitely. It is proportional. To 32 tooth would be half the torque of the 16 tooth. Even the 20T is going to be losing 25% torque over the 16T. The larger pulleys can go faster, so at some speed it might be close to the same torque (steppers drop torque as they speed up). But I would definitely suggest 20T or 16T.
thanks, that gives me some hope that i won’t need to fiddle around even more, once my 20teeth pulleys are built in. I think i might go back to 1/16 microsteps then too, since i see some rough edges with 1/8 already.
I am not a big fan of the theory that 8th is higher torque than 16th microstepping. Every other microstep, the driver will be supplying the same amount of current as 1/8th. .
When we used to argue about these things, I was convinced that 1/32nd is overkill, but harmless and 1/16th is noticeable over 1/8th. So we have configurations for 1/16 amd 1/32 and we haven’t had issues.
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