Shapeoko Pro - making noises and vibrates

[Mike-AUS (Mike Walshe)]

Hi Folks,
I have used my Shapeoko Pro about 10 times and its been great. It was dormant for about 6 months and now I fired it up again. Did a couple of small jobs in hardwood…great.

Just did a job on the weekend and it was average, most likely my settings - small wood job / fine cutting and most likely wrong bit.

Post that job I notice my machine now makes some concerning noises.

Add to that going top left to bottom right it sounds horrible. It also vibrates alot…like shaking the bolts out of it.

I did check the belts, they seem ok and throughly cleaned the rails and belts and lubed everything I could.

Once done I took this video (on rapid movement in the Carbide Motion app).

My machine is a Shapeoko Pro XXL (create has the right machine spec loaded) and I am running the latest versions of both apps.

Could you please have a look at the video and also the tracking photo so you can see what I mean.

(I have added this to youtube briefly so you can see - removing it in a week or so)

- YouTube

Any comments, recommendations, advice would be great appreciated. It didn’t do these noises prior, just started.

Thanks

Mike

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

Usually this is caused by a slight variation in belt tension from one side of the belt to the other.

My suggestion would be to try re-tensioning both sides of each belt.

[Mike-AUS (Mike Walshe)]

Thanks @WillAdams - will try this today.

Is there a guide for doing this by chance…Sorry to be a pain

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

See:

Measuring belt tension, squaring and calibration

A post about belt tension, how to measure it, what effect it has and why you need to manage belt tension in order to usefully calibrate and square the machine. As usual, no criticism of the machine here, in fact some quite clever design choices seem to have been made. The question of drive belt tension has been bugging me. How much you should have, how to check it and how it affects machine performance. I failed to find any quantitative data to use, so I went and started measuring; and found t…

[Mike-AUS (Mike Walshe)]

perfect starting point. Again thanks and appreciate the swift responses.
Legend.

Mike

[ProfessorEcks (Jon Eckels)]

I’ve had a similar sound coming from the belts when they rub against the flanges on either side of the toothed part of the motor pulley. I recently swapped out my belts and the noise went away. I have a feeling that the belts were stretched and pulling to one side of the pulley. I might have overtensioned them at one point. New ones are perfect.

[Mike-AUS (Mike Walshe)]

Thanks all for the help here. Being located in Australia means I purchased 2 of all accessories and parts (as backup) so I have spare belts. Get those on and replacements to order !

Thanks very much for you advice and comments.

Mike

[Mike-AUS (Mike Walshe)]

Just a quick update on this. I received the new belts from Carbide3D and installed them (per Winstons initial pro xxl build) and the noise was still present. Then I retensioned all the motors with the RHS motor needed in the most. Once done problem solved. The RHS motor was the main noise issue and the belts were just required and its back to tip top shape.