Thanks for the rallying call ;).

Im not suprised no one has replied. It was quite a vain hope but worth a go.

If you want stepper motors you have quite a choice. There is motioncontrolproducts.com , ebay, arc euro trade etc etc. If you want brushed dc motors for very small stuff there are plenty. Larger ,brushed, motors to be found at technobots and other robowars / robotics sites. Ac induction motors can be bought from chronos and clarke i think. Brushless motors avalable on ebay but for RC helicopters and the like. The rare earth magmotors quote 1-2Kw of power in very small packages but are £200+. Also don't think (maybe wrongly) they'd really be suitable for servo work and £265 is an expensive test.

But when it comes to brushless motors for cnc work its either get very lucky on ebay or fork out multiple hundreds for one motor. eek

Well at least thats what i have managed to turn up ;)

anaheim have responded and are pricing up a quote for me, so good news, but i fear the shipping for 3 lots of heavy motors may kill me off!

The 1000W dc motor from technobots arrived today and I am going to give it a try as a spindle motor. For £68 + shipping its not that costly a mistake if it fails. Going to try the motor straight to the PSU with the psu volts dialled down and build a pwm H-bridge later. or maybe buy off ebay if i see one i think would do at the sort of price that wins the buy/make argument.

However the BLDC stuff may hurt a little more but I'm pretty confident I can build a controller. ( pride and fall maybe !) Think it will take 2-3 months to do the electronics and software. Could buy controller for BLDC but run at $158 + hefty shipping for one plus I like the challange of building the contoller. We'll see.

I managed to get the quadrature encoder working with the dspic and a omron encoder. I tied this up with the other bits of software I have been scribbling into the compiler . eg genrating a pulse train based on number of steps orders via rs-232 and it all seems to work pretty well.

When the bldc arrive I will have to build three half bridges and code up the pwm an hall position sensing and i "should" have a controller. Couple that with the pc front end I can jog a stepper and make it move 0.001,0.01,0.1,1,10 reliably under the load of the mill head.

But it is all strung together with bits of string and needs much more work. I have enclosed a picture so you can see just how prototype the prototype is!

So I should be busy then!

Enough from me and thanks again for the post.

Rgds.,

Simon