Z stepper issues

[Tim]

I guess so. Still waiting on MakerGear to set me up to purchase a new motor. For now, my M2 is down and my dual-extruder project is stalled.

[jimc]

oh ok. i thought you were back up and running but i guess i wasnt really paying attention to the time. you only posted this on sat lol

[Tim]

Thanks, Ed, for the instructions on your site on how to replace the Z stepper motor. I would only add one thing, at the end, which is to put the machine back on its side, run the Z stage assembly all the way down, then loosen all the screws holding the Z stepper motor, and tighten them back again. There's enough play in those screws that if you tighten them while the stage is up top, it might be binding on the screw at the bottom.

The new motor's rotation is backwards from the old one's, so I had to reverse the connector on the RAMBo. Eventually I realized that this was because the brass part came installed upside down on the lead screw, and I didn't bother to check. So apart from having to reverse the connector, I knocked about a half centimeter off of my total Z height. I'm not going to go re-do the whole procedure because of it. . .

No major problems, and I'm back up and running now!

And thanks to Josh and Ryan and Rick for getting a new stepper motor out to me

[ednisley]

the brass part came installed upside down

It's basically a brass nut: both orientations rotate the same way. I spent a long time staring at a leadscrew for my Sherline, trying to figure out which way it went, until I realized it had a left-hand thread. Duh & similar remarks.

There are so many different permutation of stepper winding wires and connector pins that the initial rotation direction will be completely random. Not having to dismantle the entire machine to switch two wires counts as a major win...

[crimp3d]

I see Tim saw my original post on a similar issue last year and yes, it probably was related. I did not hear back from anyone on the forum so I continued searching and I found Ed's excellent blog. I purchased the Kysan stepper motor that Ed shows in his stepper replacement blog installment and installed it. It didn't immediately work, which got me discouraged, but a bit more research lead me to the fact that I had plugged the stepper motor into the incorrect space on the header on the board. Correcting that oversight had the bed raising and lowering without any undo howling, noise, or hints of strain.

I suspect that had I found that I had plugged my original stepper into the correct spot on the header that I would have been able to run, but would have ended up with a stepper that was overheating and potentially in the same situation that Tim was in. I have an older M2 with the 19V and 12V power supplies and the older V3 hot end. The replacement Kysan1040094 stepper works really well and barely heats up so I don't see an immediate need to upgrade the power supply to the 24V. I will probably look into the V3b hot end though.

Pierre

[Tim]

[quote="crimp3d"I will probably look into the V3b hot end though.[/quote]

The V3b looks much nicer than the V3, which has a hand-made look to it (because it's hand-made), but the characteristics are very similar, and I don't think it's worth the trouble to upgrade. I wouldn't have done an upgrade myself except for the fact that I really wanted to beta test the dual extruder and V4, and that forced me to do the whole 24V upgrade. The V4 is a real improvement, but I have wondered about the fact that it is advertised as "24V only". I can't think of any reason you can't stick a 12V heater in a V4, but then I haven't tried it.