Alignment Issue

X-Carve Troubleshooting
1

I just finished assembling my Xcarve and most of it seems to work with a few small problems. The Z axis limit switch isn’t behaving correctly and I think I actually broke it entirely but manually homing is working fine so I’m not real worried about that. The bigger issue is some form of alignment issue.

There is a “jolt” in my carves. Imagine you cut a piece of paper at a 45 degree angle from the top right to bottom left. Then put the two pieces back together but 1/8" off. I don’t feel any jerks or stiffness when I turn it off and move manually. No odd sounds, slipping belts. It just in a very controlled manner goes over a slight bit at the exact same spot on each depth pass. It stays at the same spot in the image even when I move my material and am at a new spot relative to the machine.

I’ve had it happen now with a SVG file I was trying, then a plain text I built in Easel and finally with the calibration file.

Any ideas?

2

Check over the common mistakes and calibration links.

3

Posting pictures would be very helpful, and @AbearDesign’s consolidation page would probably be very helpful to you.

Based on your description, I would also suggest looking at the belts in the vicinity of the jolts to see if there’s debris stuck in them, and check the makerslides in the vicinity to see if there’s any sort of deviation, bump, or other problem. It wouldn’t hurt to put a flat scale along the top of the V and see if there’s any barely-visible problems.