So I've been working on a refurb of an old Routermaster II. I've replaced the original electronics with a TinyG and external CW-5045 drivers. Just powered it up this morning and started jogging around. Everything works wonderfully, but the X-axis is louder than the other axes. Turning the ball-screws for the X and Y axes, they feel about the same resistance-wise. I've started dropping the amperage to that motor, but it is well below the motors 4.67A rating. I'm about to swap two of the drivers to try to eliminate the driver as the culprit. Any other ideas as to what might be the cause?
Swapping the X and Y drivers produced the same result. I should add that this isn't just a slight difference. When the X-axis moves, I am near cringing. It might just be something resonating with the motor. Not sure. In any case, I'm going to pretend that everything is fine for the moment and dial in the velocity and acceleration.
As soon as I raised the maximum velocity and did a jog, it became clear that the noise was due to something resonating with the motor. From 4 to 12 inches/minute, cacophony resulted. Over 12 inches/minute, all was well. We might run our first job this afternoon. I'm pretty excited to see some wood-chips fly.
Rural I say this guardedly, and please read up to confirm this statement, but generally, a noisy motor is a sign of low amps. Gray
Thanks Gray. I did some more testing in the afternoon and ran an air job. It was definitely something resonating in the gantry, a long way from the X-axis' motor. I tried to track it down, but couldn't find anything loose. Certainly, the motor isn't missing steps or anything like that. Once it was running jobs, the owner came over and had a look. After a moment, he stated that it was running exactly as he remembered (except for being half speed). Doubled the speed and he gave me the thumbs up. Unfortunately, the program he used to generate his G-code (TPCWin, which is pretty ancient) seems to do something strange that Chilipeppr doesn't like. Of the couple of jobs we've tried, neither were quite right. One was for a circular saw blade (cut out of wood), and it was missing a few teeth. Not a big deal as he was in the process of converting to VCarve anyway. On Monday, we should be putting the thing through its paces.
