It's been a little while since I had to tear down and fix my printer, so I guess I was about due. This time I was running into problems with my x-axis. Have been for a while, But when the x-axis movement starting jigging back and forth like it would rather be dancing than printing and not even touching the electrical engineer hat (which I don't wear particularly well) and do some investigations. The first thing I thought to figure out if it was the cable or the motor. So I went to disconnect the cable and hook it up to a spare motor I had when i saw this.
Okay, the cable is definitely in need of some maintenance. I also had a spare cable that I could have just restrung, but since that would have involved flipping the bot and removing the bottom panel I decided to just go for a splice and patch.
I thought that would have it sussed, but when I hooked the cable back up to the motor it arced pretty good. So maybe the cable was symptomatic of the real problem and the stepper motor had burned out. But since my original plan was to try a different motor it was no problem to swap it out.
After fixing the cable and swapping the motor out everything seems to be back in working order. I don't want to curse things, but I feel like I'm getting pretty good at this 3D printer maintenance thing.
