HOT motor?

TechZone Gen 3 Remix and TZ lasercut Mendel.

I've noticed that the motors get too hot to touch. I've added a switch to kill the 12VDC while idling to reduce the heat. I've also tossed on heat sinks to the X&Y motors.

... it depends on motor type and (trim-pot) adjusted current in relation to needed torque.

But it's a good idea anyway to cool the motor ...

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it should take very little effort to move x and y, z should get turned off inbetween movements, the extruder might need a lot of effort.

I recommend turning your pots all the way down, and adjusting them up until they move the pieces reliably. Adjust the pots with the power off, it can be a pain but worth it to not chance blowing anything.

have you considered just disabling the motor driver while an axis is not in use. dropping the voltage across a load that is not in use sounds a bit risky to me. do you use enable pin in your setup? thx.

I have found I have the same issue with my techzone huxley. Ive tried adjusting the pots up and down. Ultimately just added heat sinks.

With the exception of the extruder, steppers should not get hot, and even the extruder should not get so hot that you can't touch it for more than a few seconds.

If your motors are getting so hot that you cannot hold a finger on them for more than five seconds, you need to turn your pots way down. If this is not solving the problem, then you have too much friction on the slides.

Some guidelines:

Z-Stepper Just above Room Temperature
X-Stepper Just above Body Temperature
Y-Stepper Just above Body Temperature
E-Stepper 20-40 degrees above Body Temperature, not uncomfortable to touch

It should also be said that the gcode can override the pot setting (for the extruder). Skeinforge will automatically set the power to 100%. When i first succesfully used skeinforge my PLA wades extruder melted halfway during the build. Look at your gcode and search for M113:
If there is just M113 then the pots are used to set the PWM (=power) for the motors.
if there is M113 Sx.x (for example M113 S0.8) then the power is set by the firmware.

m113. this is for dc extruder only