I’m making a jig in some MDF to hold pieces of carbon fiber for drilling and a little milling.
I want to enlarge two 10mm deep pockets in the MDF by running the end mill around the perimeter of the pocket. I’m using Vectric Cut 2D Desktop for the design, and am enlarging the existing pockets by 1mm by enlarging the pocket by 1mm in Cut 2D and creating a Profile toolpath that cuts inside the new dimensions. Gsender sends the job to a Genmitsu 4040 Reno.
The job gets to a depth of 8mm in the first pocket, then the spindle stops moving but keeps rotating. Onscreen, Gsender appears like it completed the job normally. No errors, alarms or warnings. There’s no way to stop the spindle from within the Gsender software. I have to press the emergency stop button on the CNC machine to get it to stop, then home it myself.
I have double checked my design. It’s really pretty simple. There are no errors that I can see. I know I’m not hitting any limit switches. I’d just completed making the pockets when I noticed they needed to be enlarged a little, but I was expecting that.
I have rechecked my work and re-sent it several times to no avail. Any guidance would be gratefully welcomed.
I have never used or seen a genmitsu, so am not familiar with its quirks and problems. In your story I can only look for the question that haunts me as soon as I encounter a problem with my own setup. “What changed?”
The only thing that I guess that changed is that you went from milling a pocket to milling a profile. So my question is:
What if you just use pocket toolpaths with that one mm extra outer diameter. Wil your machine do that, like it did without problems earlier, or will it now stall in a pocket too?
And if the problem returns even in a pocket toolpath. What if you run the original toolpath? Will it stall even in a toolpath that ran successful earlier?
This morning I tried making two more “enlarged by 1mm” pockets in a different location on my MDF board. Same result: It got 80% of the way through the first of the two pockets and then stalled again in the same way. No motion in the X, Y or Z axes, but the spindle kept spinning.
Yesterday’s pocket program ran without any problems. Today’s pocket program crashed. The only thing that changed was the location on the 400 x 400mm MDF board where the work was taking place. If you’re asking me to rerun the pocket program it will take about 3 hours to get to the point where it crashes. I have rerun the Profile program several times. It consistently crashes about 80% of the way through the first of the two profiles.
I’m not asking you to do anything, I am wondering what changed, working with the information you provided. If you can establish old toolpaths are still working, you at least can say something about gsender maybe not being the problem.
You are way better equiped to know what changed.
Maybe you updated gsender
Installed something new in windows that might have messed with your power savings settings, causing usb to go to sleep after a while.
Maybe its just usb cable picking up noise from new led lamp or other “noisy” device, you or a neighbour installed
It can be many things and the answer to find is what changed. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes you will never find the answer. But looking for the answer will probably home you into what part of the cnc process is the one infected.
It’s a puzzle, a game of trial and error to check things off a list untill you find the problematic part.
Maybe research forum for genmitsu users. They will have better insights into the known issues of your specific machine.