Yesterday I was cutting a project. It involves some V-carving and then cutting out the finished project using an outside contour (actually cut as a pocket down to the final pass, which is an outside contour). I break the V-carving and the cutout into separate GCode files because I set zero for the V-carve on the top of the stock and I set zero for the cutout on the spoilboard.
I screwed up when saving the GCode for the cutout by not telling CC to set zero on the bottom of the stock. As a result, the bit plunged through the stock and into the spoilboard. When it tried to move in X/Y it couldn’t and made some bad noises (I’m guessing the stepper motors lost steps?). I killed the power to the machine to stop the train wreck from continuing.
I then powered back on, connected CM to the machine and initialized it. The Z axis raised out of the workpiece and the machine homed itself. I corrected the Z-zero location in CC, reexported the G-Code, and resumed cutting out the part. When it was all done I noticed that the V-Carve is slightly off-center in the finished project by about 1/16" in the Y-axis. Under normal conditions it’s dead center (I’ve made this project many times). The stock didn’t move, as it was up against the stop blocks at the end of the cut, right where I originally placed it. I suspect the problem arose when I crashed the machine. However, I was under the impression that after losing steps I could reset things by powering off/on the machine.
After that long-winded explanation of what happened, my question is this: If I crash the machine as I did in this case, how should I proceed to ensure my cuts are properly aligned? I can try to re-zero, but getting it spot-on isn’t always easy to do.
Thank you in advance for any input.