The Dremel

Some time has passed since last blog update, so what's happened? Well, I have replaced the original low quality spindle, with a Dremel. Which of course required some new mounting parts.

I cut them out of a piece of particle board and mounted in the same holes as the original pieces. And what an improvement that was, all vibrations just disappeared.

The mounted Dremel.

But then I discovered that the spindle moved a little bit in the Y-direction, when the Z-motor changed direction and pulled the spindle upwards. After some mail correspondence with tech.support, we concluded that it was caused by a small play between the plastic bearings and the Z-axis bearing support frames. So they sent me some Loctite 480. Which I applied between the bearings and the frame. Without disassemble anything (as instructed), and that did solve the problem.

The first test run

I finally got a parallel cable. Well, actually I couldn't wait any longer for the delivery, so I made my own cable, since I found two spare connectors and a piece of ribbon cable in a drawer :-).

When connecting the cable and configuring EMC2 (from http://www.linuxcnc.org/) I found an other error in the documentation. It stated the wrong (50) steps per revolution on the motors, and after emailing tech.support, I got it verified. The correct value should be 200 steps per revolution. That explains why I only got a quarter scale of everything. They will put out an errata, informing everybody about the error.

Here is a time-lapse video of my first test run with the machine: