Stepper motor cable length

[Spigs]

Hey everyone, first post here! 

I've been rebuilding an old ender frame into a switchwire using spare parts, everything has gone well, but I've run into an odd issue and wanted people's thoughts on it. 

I've used a toolhead board with a hemera, which I've mounted to the side of the hemera, all is well and everything is working apart from the extruder. I've made a fairly short cable, which seems to be causing the motor to grind and vibrate. Assumed I'd mixed up the wires and checked, but they are correct. Tried a different cable and that worked fine. So I chopped that, wired it exactly the same and back to grinding and stuttering .... I just reconnected the cable using some wagos and it worked fine again... guessing this is due the the cable being very short (about 5/6cm). Has anyone come across this before? Is there a way to know how long the cable needs to be? I've chopped wires down on hot ends before and never had this issue... saying that I've not made one so short. 

I don't really need the toolhead, just as I had it, I thought I'd tidy up the cables a little, but if I neex to have a long ole cable for the motor, that will defeat the point lol

Edited May 17 by Spigs

[lawson.brian]

Length should not be an issue. This is one of my toolhead stepper wire lengths. Can you take a photo?

 

[Spigs]

Thanks for the reply :). Yeah, I've been thinking about this, my 2.4 has a short ass cable and that's fine ..its using a ldo nighthalk tool head with no problem. 

I actually gave up, it drove me crazy and I endded up ditching the toolhead. I just didn't understand why a longer cable would be fine and a short one just caused that grinding noise you might get if wires are mixed up 

 

The printer went well otherwise. Need to change the bed mounts for some silicone boots though. It's so un-level on the y axis lol.

I'm quite tempted to just build a toolhead/hotend with the wristwatch extruder then something like the dragon burner, or just the mini stealthburner and pop the hemera on my other old ender but this was supposed to be a parts bin jobby and something to continue printing smaller bits or stuff with tpu...

 

Edited May 20 by Spigs

[lawson.brian]

If it works then run with it.

You could get the silicon bed mounts and then slowly shim each corner to square it with the uprights - depends on how much out of square the bed / bed frame is.

 

 

 

[Spigs]

The frame is square..i think haha.

There is about 1mm of a slope on the bed going from front to back ...guessing my little aluminium standoffs are slightly different size and/or the bed has some flex in it (thin ender bed). I'm hoping the silicone standoffs will give me enough movement to use screw tilt ajust and try to lower the front of the bed.

[lawson.brian]

cheaper still - dropping in a couple of spare 1mm shims from your 2.4 kit in the back two standoffs should do the trick .

You could even test with a couple of slim TPU printed shims on the bed frame side to work out what you need. The Silicon mounts for the ender are quite rigid from memory so 1mm might be a bit much and cause the bed itself to flex too much around the screw holes if you crank it down.

 

[Spigs]

To be fair, it's printing fine. 1mm front to back sounds like alot to me and i wondered if it would cause me issues with the first layer, but bed mesh seems to deal with it fine, one of the first prints I did was a giant minifigure and it printer very well. Done other little prints as well which have been fine, I have ordered a little box of shims and I'm also making a cf x axis mount, essentially painting a racing stripe hahaha. 

 

I still have no idea why a short cable did not work, but a longer cable (about 30cm) worked fine.... 

[Spigs]

I cut a carbon fiber y carriage today, its 114g :), about 132 grams lighter than my old cut down ender axis. I also released I had some little paper washers under the bed spacers, took the two out from the front and the range has reduced from about 1.1mm to 0.3 :).... Happy with that.

 

[lawson.brian]

How much did removing so much weight from the Y axis help with the accelerations? The two rails on the Ender conversions look quite sturdy.