I would like to know how long the servo motors of this machine last?
I bought it more than two years ago and I have already changed the motors several times, exactly the X axis motor, it is the one that has caused the most problems. This motor always tends to jam during the process and I have to turn off the machine urgently.
After this machine gave me the first failure, I have not had the confidence to leave it alone while it works, I have to be in front of it with the fear that it will present a new failure and it is always the same.
The stock motors on an Shapeoko are stepper motors. Servo motors are a different kind of motor. My SO3 is 8 years old and has never had a stepper motor go bad.
I was a field engineer for 45+ years. When a machine has a repeated problem it can be an engineering defect or it is something localized to your machine. People rarely report stepper motors going out here on the forum and for you to have multiple failures in the same location you need to do a thorough analysis of your wiring. If you have loose wires or poor connections that might cause your motor to lock up.
A stepper motor is a series of coils inside the motor. Pulses are sent to the stepper to move it a defined amount in forward or reverse. If you have a loose wiring that could cause the motor to seem to be locked up. With the power off the motor should spin freely. Just remember to not move the motor too fast or an electrical field is generated by the motor itself and could possibly damage the driver circuits on your controller.
It could just be bad luck to have repeated failures but I would tend to think you have a problem localized to your machine and not a built in defect. All electronic devices have a mean time between failure. The engineers that design the hardware and estimate the failure rate. Stepper motors generally have a very low mean time between failure meaning they are very reliable. Sometimes you get whole batches of electrical components that were made wrong but your repeated failures would discount a bad batch because it would be fantastically impossible to get two stepper motors from the same defective batch in the time period you have had failures.
So go through your wiring/connectors and investigate them very carefully. Anything is possible but if I were a betting man I would bet is something in your environment that is causing these failures.
I have no complaints about the efficiency of this machine (Shapeoko Pro), it is very good, it’s just that at this point I have not seen the causes and I have even dismantled the motor and the belt several times, I have not loose cables. Today when I return home I will continue checking, because the strange thing is that this is caused at a sudden moment after having been working perfectly.
This may not be an easy problem to figure out but most stepper motors work or not. Intermittent operations would indicate a wiring and/or driver problem.
This morning I dismantled the X-axis motor in the same position where the machine had gotten stuck. Try to manually generate movements to the head Horizontally and there confirm that it is not the motor, apparently there is something on the machine rail or on the belt that is obstructing its movement in this Axis; Today when I get home I will disassemble everything to verify who it is the opponent.
