[joecnc1]

I,
recently purchased a used chinese 4x8 cnc with regenerative blower. There is a 6.6 hp water cooled spindle.
I could not locate the mach 3 dat file or xml. I purchased a new mach 3 license and have been manually trying to configure the machine.
The machine has Leadshine m860s stepper drives. I am not sure what kind of power supply and dont think there is a breakout board,
I think the drive wires directly to the parralel port. The Y has two nema 43 stepper motors which drive the rack and pinion with a 1" pinion gear and a 4" plastic reduction gear. The gantry runs on a linear bearing rail. The x has a single stepper with a 20 mm 6tpi ball screw. The Z has a 16mm 5tpi ball screw with about 7 inches of gantry clearance. Through trial and error, I found the axis would jog in mach if I enabled xyz and then set step and direction to x-3-4, y 5-6, z 7-8. I also am able to jog all the way into the limit switches. They then get stuck and the machine
has to be powered off and then manually turn the screw to get it to move away from the switch. I beleive i have the soft limits set correctly in the motor home config. However the DRO have numbers that are way out of the limits. I dont see a table layout on the screen in mach 3. I am starting to understand the way mach communicates to the machine via the ports and pins but am wondering what the proper configuration sequence is? I dont know what the proper settings are and how to determine whether they are active low or high.I dont think i have the motors tuned correctly but they are working and moving fairly smooth. I dont think i have the right home inputs to outputs. Ss there any documentation on setting up a router,
for the first time which will aid in configuring all the proper settings? Or is it a case of trial and error to get it all working smooth. Please offer some guidance and what sequenced is a standard practice-Joe

[ger21]

You'll want to configure your limit switches as home switches as well, so that you can Home (Ref All in Mach3) the machine. Until you Home the machine, the softlimits are not going to work correctly. If you already have the limit switches working correctly, then you just need to assign the same port and pin numbers for the limits to the home switch inputs.

When you hit the limits, there's a manual limit override on the settings or diagnostic page that will allow you to jog off the switches. There's also an automatic override which is always active.