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I might be taking things a little conservative as I’ve never run a cnc machine with tiny belts driving the axis. Maybe I will have to push my machine a bit harder and see how she does. Depth of cut and the diameter of the tool plays as big a part as the feed rate so I was commenting when I probably should have been asking questions. Glad to hear your having some success, I have been quite pleased with the X carve so far, might still convert mine so I can run it on Mach 3, it’s not necessarily my favorite but I’m used to it and the tool change option is almost a must have for what I usually cut.
That may be some flex in your Y axis. You can tighten that up with some L brackets going to the inside track of the Y axis, bolted down to the waste board.
For MDF I recommend a downcut bit (I got mine at my local Lowe’s). You should be able to power through MDF pretty quick. If you are having problems try reducing your depth of cut a bit, that makes a big difference on the load put on the bit.
Brian - to me your pic shows a massive single-axis single-event displacement of probably a few thousand steps in one hit. To me this is not a stepping or “tuning” error, which tends to be accumulative and apparent as many small displacements, as do loose pulleys, etc.
I recognise it well, having intermittently experienced this with my machine for nearly a year, broke lots of cutters, nearly gave up, finally reasoned it had to be a computer fault. I changed the RAM modules and it vanished. I’ll replace the whole computer next as a safety measure.
Looking back, I should have just hooked up another computer, copied over the Mach3 config files, and tried that much earlier than I did. Trouble was, for my entirely DIY machine, I could tell which bit to trust the least…
Well … got around to doing this today and that was the problem. The “wobble” or “skipping” along the Y-axis was resolved after following the motor calibration steps.