The stepper motors have arrived that I’m going to use to convert my Taig Micro-Mill to CNC.
It’s hard to explain how exciting this is. I’ve dreamed of owning a CNC machine tool for probably twenty years and yet somehow never got around to building one. I bought the Taig about a decade ago for another project with the intention of fitting it with DC motors and encoders and building my own servo controllers (in hindsight that was a bit of a silly idea considering steppers are relatively cheap and work OK on a machine as small as the Taig). I got as far as buying the motors, encoders, pulleys and toothed belts, and a large block of aluminium that I was going to machine the mountings from, before the project ground to a halt. There are some photos on my old website of the mill when I first received it. I have used it occasionally as a manual mill but what I really want is to be able to use it to machine complicated parts under automatic control.
The motors are bigger than I expected, and I went for the small end of the range people tend to put on this machine. There are a couple of different theories on stepper motor sizing for the Taig mill: 1. use small motors and keep everything well adjusted and lubricated so you don’t need lots of torque. 2. use big motors so you have lots of torque in reserve and it doesn’t matter so much if the leadscrews and slides get a bit stiff. The advantage of the smaller motor option, as well as lower cost (both in terms of the motors and the electronics to drive them), weight, power consumption, and heat generated, is that smaller motors have lower winding inductance and armature mass. Lower inductance means the torque doesn’t drop off as rapidly as the speed increases; lower mass means they can accelerate and decelerate quicker. I’ve read people advocating both paths and claiming to get better results with small/large stepper motors, but the smaller, nimbler option appealed to my sensibilities more (as somebody who is happy driving a small, light car with a 48Bhp engine).