Thanks for the welcome(s). I've already done a great deal of the groundwork to get this thing up and running, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get it actually doing some work.

I spent this afternoon looking at the ways and ball-screws of the X-Y table and after a little adjustment it's working much better. This thing is, like most Swiss stuff, beautifully made and really nice quality components have been used including dual-ball-nut screws allowing the micro-adjustment of the pre-load. I'm going to stick to the 2000mm/min rapid as this is reliable.

I'm running from the parallel port of a 10 year old Dell PC - two parallel ports actually (in anticipation of the many inputs required for the extra limit switches). I really like your suggestion of using LinuxCNC. I've only been using Mach3 up to now as I have a friend who's been building small CNC machines for the last 15 years and is very knowledgeable about Mach3. However, I've always used a Mac and am not overly keen on the MS operating systems so switching to another Unix based OS appeals to me.

Would I be better off using a motion controller rather than the parallel ports?