Stuttering when manually moving axis

Hello,

I am not sure what it is called, so a little hard to find previous questions on this. I noticed if I move the gantry when the power is off, slowly, it seems normal, but if I move a little quickly it seems to stutter or skip.

The cutting seems fine, but maybe there is some tolerance issue happening or I have not setup some part correctly. I also only noticed it once the belts were on, so maybe it has something to do with the motor? The belt is around 8lbs at 1" high (I followed some guide for using luggage hanger), which doesn’t seem too tight.

Here is a video of it:

Does this happen to all machines?

Thanks for any feedback.

The stepper motors function as generators — when you push quickly / hard enough they will generate sufficient current for the stepper drivers to push out a pulse — that is what you feel.

Please limit pushing the machine by hand when the belts are connected to the bare minimum necessary — it’s possible to generate sufficient current to damage a stepper driver.

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Thank you!

It would be nice to have some warning sticker or something about manually sliding gantry when belt is connected.

It’s not a problem worth a warning. It’s possible, but improbable to cause damage. It’s kind of self limiting in this case because if you try to move it faster it’ll lock up harder and you won’t be able to move it (unless you really, really try)

To some degree, you must move the carriage around when the belts are connected for various reasons, so putting a warning on there would have people thinking that they can’t move anything or horrible things will happen…which isn’t the case either.

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