OK....after a good few weeks trying to get as much info as possible and watching lots of Utube videos.........

I've got my machine...roughly 450mm x 400mm working area..... up and running. Got nema type 23 motors and controller off EBAY (from China) and linear bearings, rails etc from motion control in Bournmouth ...living here in Spain it's very difficult to source anything at all (except the steel) and made even worse by my poor Spanish...but I've only lived here 8 years :-))

Actually dragged it (the machine) ....with the help of my long-suffering wife.......up from my underbuild (very small workshop really) last week and plugged it into the PC.

Using Mach 3 I stuck a pencil on the Z axis where the router will eventually go and asked it to draw my name - lazycam conversion of the word GERRY done in illustrator.

Eureka...it actually worked but wrote it backwards and mirrored :-(( After much head scratching I eventually sussed out I had the x and y axis reversed...in the end it wrote GERRY and, sad as it may seem, I was over the moon!!

Now 1st question - this has proably been asked before many times but it's just too hot here to search!!

For economy reasons, I'm using ordinary threaded rod with ordinary nuts..I know all about backlash but I'm broke!! This means that everything runs a bit slow as it takes approx 17 turns for a 25mm movement.

I have measured it at 'rapid' feed rate to be around 20 inches per minute - not too bad....... but of course when it's 'cutting' (drawing) it's much slower.....also, if I try to speed up the steppers they just seem to stall - don't know why - hope someone can explain......

Is there anything in the Gcode that I can change to speed the cutting up a bit....remember 3 months ago I'd never heard of Gcode!!

I have a plasma cutter and would like to make a machine for that but the present one, although slow, would be OK for a wood router, but much too slow for my plasma.

Anything simple I'm doing wrong??