Randy Digby
04-02-2012, 11:27 PM
It always happens this way. My wife and I work together and the little business keeps us both busy. She has been away two weeks now caring for her mom in post heart surgery rehab at her home, so I've been pulling some long hours. Saturday morning I'm planning on running our Speedy 100 all weekend to get caught up. Linda has been able to type in name lists and email them to me so I can just engrave, engrave, engrave this weekend. Then it happened Saturday morning late. The Speedy stopped and all of its lights and chimes went off.
I emailed my salesman, Don Mayhew, and within five minutes he is on the phone with me between his lunch bites. He logs on to my PC and does a firmware check just to see if something pops. He then has me remove a cover and check the encoder plug in on the x-axis motor (I was getting a x-axis failure error message). As I was standing on my head (my install is tight) and checking those wires, I bumped the motor leads and all three wires broke clear of the PC board connector. I thought I had really screwed things up, but I knew that I had not bumped the wires that hard, so maybe we were on to something.
So three of three wires are out of the connector (wires broke at the pinch point of the spring loaded wire terminals) so I don't know which wire goes where. So Don, already late for an appointment because of me, heads to his shop so he can call me with the wiring order. I stripped the wires, got them back in the plug and I was off to the races.
One of the things I have learned here is that we are pretty much all blessed with good tech/sales contact persons for our laser equipment. I certainly can't handle 15K+ for a spare machine as many others here cannot. We all operate in a run it till it dies and then panic mode, for the most part. I guess our sales/tech support team understands that and, for the most part, are willing to interrupt their free/family time for us when we need them.
I emailed my salesman, Don Mayhew, and within five minutes he is on the phone with me between his lunch bites. He logs on to my PC and does a firmware check just to see if something pops. He then has me remove a cover and check the encoder plug in on the x-axis motor (I was getting a x-axis failure error message). As I was standing on my head (my install is tight) and checking those wires, I bumped the motor leads and all three wires broke clear of the PC board connector. I thought I had really screwed things up, but I knew that I had not bumped the wires that hard, so maybe we were on to something.
So three of three wires are out of the connector (wires broke at the pinch point of the spring loaded wire terminals) so I don't know which wire goes where. So Don, already late for an appointment because of me, heads to his shop so he can call me with the wiring order. I stripped the wires, got them back in the plug and I was off to the races.
One of the things I have learned here is that we are pretty much all blessed with good tech/sales contact persons for our laser equipment. I certainly can't handle 15K+ for a spare machine as many others here cannot. We all operate in a run it till it dies and then panic mode, for the most part. I guess our sales/tech support team understands that and, for the most part, are willing to interrupt their free/family time for us when we need them.