X GANTRY JUMPED OFF THE RAIL - WHAT THE...???

[mark holm (Unregistered Guest)]

So I'm buzzing away in the shop and everything's going great, as it has since I got my S.B. about a year & a half ago (I only put a few hours a week on it) and the X axis movement starts to shudder. It screws up my material, but I'm able to re-register the X axis & recover. 20 minutes later I'm buzzing away again & the same thing happens, except this time the shuddering is so severe that the left bearing of both X-cars jump off the rails. I figure it's not the PC. It's one of the motors or the controller.

Comments anyone? Help please!

[srwtlc]

Just out of curiosity, were you using the windows version or the dos version? I've had two different machines stutter/shudder with the windows version. Each computer was running Win98se, but one was much faster and had twice the ram. The slower machine/computer combo would shudder quite hard where the faster one would just hiccup.

[pappy]

Mark

I've had this happen to me twice just recently. The first time, it was lack of grease in the drive gears. Observing them very closely when they are dry you will see that the gear teeth actually stick in the rack and create resistance.
The second occurrance, the x motor on the inboard side just quit working. I called SB and they said that since my machine was out of warranty and it was probably the wire to that motor that they would send me a new one for $40 plus S&H. Otherwise it might be a bad connection. I removed and replaced each wire from each end of that WAGO connector and it must have been a bad connection because it has been running great ever since.

[elcruisr]

I'll double the experience Doug had. After a few years mine did just what yours did twice in one week. We reset all the wire connectors and not a hitch after that.

Eric

[gerald_d]

Don't let this happen too often. If you are having wire or connector problems, you are stressing the control board and could blow a driver soon.

[mark holm (Unregistered Guest)]

OK, I greased up the rails, and I cleaned & reset all the connectors. The unit worked flawlessly during a 2-hour session yesterday. It looks like these actions rectified the problem(s). My sincere thanks to all those who commented.