--But there is a silver lining...

Yesterday I noticed the X stepper motor 'thumping'... Uh oh...

Occasionally when the rotary's plugged in it'll thump. I can make it quit by wiggling the rotary's plug. But it's never thumped otherwise till yesterday.

It's been idle all day till about an hour ago when I started a stainless job. While setting up the next job all of a sudden the laser starts making racket and the laser head is thrashing back & forth, so a hit the pause button as fast as I could. When i hit the reset, the head was 'stuck' briefly until the Y got home, then the X went home. I rebooted, and tried to pick up the job where it left off. About 3 sweeps in the racket started again-- best way I can describe it, is if you took a Dremel tool running full blast and then pressed the whole thing against the laser box... or an extremely amplified dentist's drill.

And a bunch of dollar signs with wings started to fly away... I just paid off the IS7000 last week, so it just figures ...

But- after a little trial and error testing, I discovered the machine is acting EXACTLY like the Triumph did when it was messing up-- as in, only the X is messing up, and it only messes up at certain Y coordinates. Both machines, not ironcially, messed up at around the half-way point. And the problem with the Triumph was:
This broken wire ------- within the drag chain...
brokenwire.jpgchain3.jpg

--the repetitive bending within the chain does take it's toll.

And the silver lining? I KNOW this is the problem with the LS900, because I was lucky enough to actually see a wire spark in the chain when slewing the head up and down. So all I need to do is spend a couple of hours repairing some wires and connections, and I can put those flying $$$ back in their cage...