Shopbot running slower than it should.

[Keith Oates]

Im running a 3d wood grain pattern, i have run them many many times. I am using a 1/16th BN, i run it at 5 ips. According to aspire it should take 1 hour and a half. I know that i have to add roughly 30 mins to this time , just because my machine cant run as fast as the aspire program thinks...
The problem is ,it took almost 10 hours. :eek: I believe somthing got reset on my bot when we moved the shop around. Any help would be greatly appercatied!!


Thx Keith!!!

[cowboy1296]

i wish i knew how to judge my time. if the shopbot appears to be running fine then the scale in your estimated time may be off. i think rapid is the feed rate, but you judge the scale by timing a piece and adjusting it for your machine.

anyhow i am interested in what some of the other have to say about this because i have not fine tuned it yet myself.

[Keith Oates]

My rapid is set to 5 ips and scale is 2.0 . i set that rapid to the same that i run the bits. I dont know if this is correct , but so far i have gotten good results !!..............until the 10 hour cut that is!!

[cowboy1296]

i put my feedrate in that as well. but my feed rate for a .25 inch bit might be a little different then an 1/8. is the file too big to post on here or if you want you can email i to me and i will see what my software says.

[tmerrill]

Keith,

You should set the rapid to whatever jog rate you have set on the main control panel. The scale factor needs to be calibrated for you machine, and it will vary between 2D cuts, slightly detailed 3D cuts and very detailed 3D cuts. You calibrate it by running the file, note the time it took by looking at the bottom of the main control or open the LOG file, then adjust the scale in Aspire until the estimated time matches the actual time. But realize it will always be an estimate as it calculates time simply by cut distance and set feed rate - it does not consider any ramping.

If you preview the .sbp file in the ShopBot control set to Preview you will get a more accurate time estimate.

Tim

[ssflyer]

Hi Keith,

I had an interesting problem awhile back. The speeds I set would seem to change in the middle of a cut. I upgraded the SB3 software and the problem went away.

Since you've run these before, and now the time has changed radically, I would suspect this, or some change in your setup.

[Keith Oates]

Im already running SB3, i watched the program run yesterday , when it started.. it looked good, a good speed. i left and when i came back by it was running slower i checked the speeds on the sb panel and they had not changed. They still read the same speed 5 ips. but the spindle was moving noticably slower...

[gc3]

post a video...youtube

[ssflyer]

Keith,
You say you are already running SB3, but which version? This is exactly the issue I had - I would watch it cutting fine, and (usually at a corner) drastically slow down and stay that way throughout the rest of the cut, or until I restarted it.

I don't remember the SB3 version that I had this issue with, but after updating to the current version, I've never seen it happen again.

You can check your version by clicking "Help | About" or just "ha" in SB3.

You can download the latest version here. (http://www.shopbottools.com/mSupport/controlsoftware.htm)