Hi guy's,

I've been on this project for a while now and its getting to the point where I'm sick of it sitting in the corner gathering dust, when I could be making loads of swarf with it and possibly earning a few quid at the same time.

I bought a Bridgeport MDI series 1 about 2 years ago, the iron was really good and apart from a dodgy servo, mechanically and electrically it was great, bargain price too! I bought with the intention of retrofitting to modern controls so I'd end up with a machine I could easily fire up and either run a quick conversational type program or load a complex cam outputted G code file. Since then I've had a few hurdles to overcome, but I've ended up with a machine that has CNC Drive Dugong type servo drives, original DC servomotors with new encoders and a custom built power supply. I've tested all of this up with a cheapo parallel port breakout board and mach3 just to try out the movements. All servo's tuned and working great individually, however, run a bit of a simple circle program and there is some weird stuff going on... It seems that when say the x axis is doing a movement then another axis starts to move, all axis pause momentarily then the desired movement is carried out. To watch it cutting fresh air, its hardly noticeable, but if i were to try and cut some material then I'd end up with a lot of problems. Also, I've tried out the MPG function (if you can call it that) in mach3 and its less than useless, I really wouldn't trust it to work with in a production environment.

So, my dilemma is this: do I opt for something like an ethernet smooth stepper and put up with mach3 until mach4 is properly developed and all features available? Or do I go with something like an Eding cnc package? I've heard good things about Eding, but the boards that I consider affordable don't offer as many inputs and outputs as I'd like. Mach3 is a pile of crap, I know this because I use it every day on my plasma cutter. I've just about got used to its "moments", but wouldn't build a machine on this platform, especially based around the parallel port!

I've spent probably 6 months debating which system to go for, Ideally I don't want to spend too much over £200, but I'd also like to have a machine I can use without thinking about it for another 6 months!

Any words of wisdom?