Just finally finished my build, got it all calibrated, and it’s working well!
A few quick questions -
There doesn’t seem to be an end stop at the far ends of the X or Y axis, is there a software setting that I should do to stop me accidentally driving the machine into the far ends?
I’ve been trying to be super careful but there have been a few times when it’s done it. Will it cause damage?
When I build it’s final table, is it a matter of just running all the calibrations again?
and finally - I saw somewhere a video of the machine being calibrated to the edges of the workpiece with the touch plate - in the X, Y and Z planes - they held the touch plate to the sides of the piece and the top. What advantage does that give you ?
Thanks and sorry for the newbie questions - there’s a lot to learn!
** Edit - oh yeah one more thing - when I power the machine down, it rolls down the Z axis and ends up sitting on the router bit if not removed. Is that normal? Do you just make sure you remove the router bit before power off? or put a little cushion underneath?
In general, the end stops only work when homing, so even if there was an end stop there, it would not stop jogging. When you crash into the end, it’s not going to hurt anything. The machine will make a terrible noise which is the stepper motors skipping steps but it does not hurt them. Technically, you can enable something called soft limits to prevent this, but that comes with some other complications and I would not recommend it for a CNC. I have them enabled on my pen plotter, but not my LowRider.
Yep. If you calibrated steps per mm, that shouldn’t change but you should re-square and adjust the pulloffs.
I did this once as an exercise in curiosity. Honestly, it only matters if you have an exact size workpiece and where X/Y starts matters. I personally have never had a need for this. You can just jog to the right spot. It is very common to probe Z.
That’s 100% normal and means the leadscrews are well lubricated. Some people just put boards or something underneath it so the beam rests on those instead.
