this helped a lot folks. thank you.
I have all the motors working, all the end stops responding as expected.
now I have a new but related issue. now that tings are moving in the right direction and the endstops are triggering, the homing sequence is getting stuck for the Z axis. Since the position it is occuring at is one of the bed leveling positions I defined, I can only assume that autobedleveling is being triggered as part of the homing sequence. I do not have a Z-probe installed for this procedure to work. I Have to get the basic functionality of the printer working so that I can print a mount for the sensor.
is there a way to manually set Z-home?