My machine lost its mind today, a repeat of a fault that fixed itself about 12 months ago and has been fine since. I had initialized the machine and was setting my work piece zero, off it went to the bit setter and then the z-axis started behaving like it was seizing up, jumping up and down, so I e-stopped it. Tried to initialize it again, only this time it started driving the z-axis straight towards the table; e-stop. Initialize again, it headed up to the z-stop, jumped a bit and gave an error message about not being able to pull off the switch. Powered off, moved the z-axis up and down manually (no drive) and confirmed it was not seized. Tried again and again and… insanity was setting in! Removed the motor, same problem - the shaft was jumping randomly. Tried a different motor, same problem. After many, many hours of fault finding, I finally traced the problem to the z axis connector that is in the carriage, one of the pins had come out of the 6 pin (4 wires) connector, so I pushed it back in, same problem?!?? Pulled the connector apart again, centralized all the pins, clipped it back together and it worked! Boy, what a fun Friday afternoon.
The machine had done a lot of traveling before I got it, so it’s highly likely it happened during one of its many dis-assembly/re-assembly journeys.
If anybody finds themselves in the same situation in the future, I hope this helps save you a few hours of head scratching!
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