My Epilog Laser Is On Drugs - Laser Head Travel

[Ed Maloney]

Hi Folks - My laser head is going berserk. I cleaned the encoder strip, checked the belts, motors, and ribbon cable. Have any words of wisdom?

Ed

[Mark Ross]

Check the watchacallit thingys...the rails and the pulleys. See the ends of the rails have a flat spot in the round and the pulleys have a couple of set screws that go in the pulley. If these become loose you get a small amount of slop at this point and it can translate to large errors. I have also had a rail break at the pulley interface point, when this happens there is still enough pressure to somewhat move the rail. When you move the head with the x,y off, you should not feel any play in the head in either the x or y direction. Short of all that, my guess is that you have an encoder board that is on the fritz. Try running a line in the x position and measure it, and one in the y direction and measure it. The one that is too short or too long is the encoder that is on the fritz.

[Kellie Reinhart]

Ed,

X-axis reader could be dirty; ribbon cable may have an intermittent broken wire; or optical encoder strip is damaged. Give Epilog tech support a call @ 303-215-9171 and refer them to your picture on here.

Kind regards,

Kellie

[Ed Maloney]

Ed,

X-axis reader could be dirty; ribbon cable may have an intermittent broken wire; or optical encoder strip is damaged. Give Epilog tech support a call @ 303-215-9171 and refer them to your picture on here.

Kind regards,

Kellie

Thanks Kellie - I did send an email to Epilog last night and got a response this morning. As one of the past threads here suggested, Epilog said to reverse the ribbon cable and let them know if that clears it. I'll report back once I get a chance to do that.

[Ed Maloney]

So far so good. I was able to get a few orders out and of course the Epilog support folks were great. Reversed the ribbon cable, but I did blow out the laser head area with compressed air. There was a hair (probably from our recently rescued Harrier hound) but it was on the opposite side of the encoder strip. Either way I don't care it looks good right now!

[Bill Cunningham]

order a new ribbon cable in the mean time. The reversed cabel is just a temp patch. If one wire is bad, others are not far behind..

[Will Cockrell]

Hey guys, I'm having the same issue on a Hurricane laser, however mine does not have an encoder strip. Any ideas on what would take the place of and encoder strip to read the x and y axis movements? The rails that the head slides along have green plastic dots every 3 inches or so, could that have anything to do with the movements of the laser head? Sorry this may sound dumb, I work for a company that uses a laser engraver, and have been charged with solving the issue, but am still very new to the machine and how it works. Any help will be greatly greatly appreciated.

[Bert Kemp]

Call Hurricane tech support

[Clark Pace]

Call Hurricane tech support

You should have had the talked with your laser about the hazard of using drugs!

[Dan Hintz]

Hey guys, I'm having the same issue on a Hurricane laser, however mine does not have an encoder strip. Any ideas on what would take the place of and encoder strip to read the x and y axis movements?

There are no encoders on those machines... it assumes that the carriage goes where it's told to go. If it gets off of where it is supposed to be, it will not fix itself until the system homes again (and even then it's not guaranteed to fix it).

[Bill George]

Hey guys, I'm having the same issue on a Hurricane laser, however mine does not have an encoder strip. Any ideas on what would take the place of and encoder strip to read the x and y axis movements? The rails that the head slides along have green plastic dots every 3 inches or so, could that have anything to do with the movements of the laser head? Sorry this may sound dumb, I work for a company that uses a laser engraver, and have been charged with solving the issue, but am still very new to the machine and how it works. Any help will be greatly greatly appreciated.

Briefly Stepper motor CNC machines as most Chinese are, don't really know where they are at, they rely on a Home position established by hitting a switch or switches of some kind. The stepper motor driver card is set to output steps (pulses) to match the motor and system gearing. The software keeps track by outputting steps to know where the motor is sent. If for some reason the motor misses some steps because of an error of some kind, like a bad bearing in the carriage or a crash its a machine gone wild as the controller has no idea where the carriage is located.

Servo motors are a precision built DC or sometimes AC motor driven by motor driver card. But the servo has an encoder that feeds back into the software so if the software sends it to X,Y and its not at the point according to the encoders the machine faults out and stops. Servo systems tend to be faster and more expensive than steppers.

Now someone who is an expert will come in and make additions and corrections but the above is the Readers Digest version.

[Barb Macdonald]

There's a magnet, little one, on the left side (home) of the machine head. Sits to the left of the encoder. It's the "stop" for the x axis. If it gets dirty, things get ugly. Clean, clean, and clean parts you didn't even know were there. Good luck!