I've recently bought an ex-demo (read as: brand new apart from 2 small chips on paint) Warco WM16 mill/drill for a bargain price of £750. Having weighed up the price of power feed and DRO vs the cost of a CNC conversion, I decided to go CNC.

This is my first ever build, however I've worked in engineering since starting my apprenticeship 19 years ago.

I'd like some help and advice for the build, especially for anyone that has previously converted similar machines such as:

weiss wmd20lv
champion 20v
amadeal ama25lv
warco wm18 (slightly bigger)

After stripping the machine to get it into my cellar workshop I cleaned off all the packing grease, re-lubricated all slides and screws and set up the gibs to be as tight but smooth as possible. For the time being, because the machine is new and because I don't need micron accuracy, I am going to use the stock lead screws and convert to ball screws if/when I need them. To work out which stepper motors I would need, I ran the Z axis in the up direction (as that is the stiffest to turn by hand) using a dial torque wrench. Worst point was near the top and gave me a reading of 1.6Nm. The X and Y axis were <1Nm with a vice and around 5Kg of weight on them. Based on that, I figured that the commonly available 3.1Nm motors would be more than capable, so I bought a kit from Zapp Automation: http://www.slidesandballscrews.com/d...xis-p-621.html via Gary's eBay listings. He had one kit listed as an auction starting at £180. I won it for £205 so had another joyous moment.

Sooo, my questions so far:

1. Have I bought the right kit? I'm pretty sure I've done good as the components in the Hong Kong specials on eBay didn't look very well matched. Plus I wanted separate, easy to replace parts rather than an all in one board.

2. Are 3.1Nm stepper motors man enough? I thought they were double my needs but have read that "holding torque" is not equal to motor torque.

3. Should I go for direct drive couplings or use reduction pulleys and timing belts?

4. The stepper motors are 8-wire. Should I wire them in series or parallel? What's the difference in performance?

5. I've fabricated a custom stand with a couple of shelves, a stainless steel drip tray and castors (for ease of moving the machine around the workshop!) with intentions of adding pumped coolant/suds at a later date. I'm going to build all the electronics, including the PC components, into a control panel box which will be mounted under the mill, on one of the shelves. Is it "normal" to use 4-core cable and 4-pin plugs and panel mount sockets for the motors or is it better to hard wire them through skin top glands, especially if there's suds in the vicinity? Will there be any problems using this setup?

6. Software will be 100% Linux based. I've not used any M$ or Windows products for 3+ years, so don't wish to take a step backwards. I'm a complete newby to CAD but have tried FreeCAD, HeeksCAD, Medusa4 and QCAD. Of these, QCAD was by far the most intuitive, and worked well with dfx2gcode which I then ran in EMC2. Bearing in mind that I want to control 3 axis of my mill, will QCAD be sufficient? I know it's only 2D but can 3D gcode be auto-generated by combining standard orthographic views drawn in QCAD?

Thanks to anyone that can help.