Progress ...

I think.

So I ordered two of these. And they came with plugs with about 18 inch long wire leads. The plug is identical to that on the X axis drive. The other end is sadly bare.

http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-Scr...=1428103605&sr=8-6&keywords=sainsmart+stepper

When installed in the printer in they should provide 240mm of print height easy and with a little creative design in the x brackets I think it could get up to 250-260mm.

Anyways I plugged one motor into the X axis and the motors go just fine so that was exciting. I put some DuPont connectors on the bare leads and plugged them into the Z axis position on the RAMPS board and triple checked the order of the wiring. I got lots of herky jerky motion so then I just figured I'd tune the driver. No amount of tuning seemed to do anything. So I dropped a new driver in and still nothing. I then unplugged from the Z position on the RAMPS board and plugged it in to the X knowing that driver was already in tune. Nothing.

So I realized my splice job sucked and tried to splice it again. Still nothing.

After some head scratching I thought I'd pull the core out of the original steppers because I know the wiring there works. So I took the 4 screws off the back of each stepper, pushed the cores out and swapped them. Put it back together and it worked.

Well sort of. Connected to the X-Axis RAMPS position I got good movement. When switched over to the Z RAMPS position it stuttered. I changed the steps per mm, speed, and acceleration in the firmware so the Z matched the X. Didn't change anything.

Next up is back to tuning the driver and/or dropping a new driver in.

 

I found the DuPont connectors didn't make good contact with the pins. Could that be the issue?

 

So scabbing the wiring and using the original guts seems to have worked pretty well. I have not adjusted the extrusion or anything yet and am quite happy. Oh and the good one was printed without the top on constraining the smooth Z rods.

I still want to switch to dual smooth Z rods, but that is probably a ways off.

 

I should say that had I seen Marquis rigid coupler solution I would have given that a try.

 

I would have drilled the hole out for the smooth Z rods and dropped in a bearing but I don't have enough height right now because my Z rods support at the bottom is too tall.

I also really don't like the limit switch being so far off center from everything. This is where Mike's solenoid position sensor comes in