School me on the best machine for big hardwood

[bluesking]

Thanks again Clive,

Something has been sitting uneasy with me about all of this and I think I may have finally figured it out. When I'm seeing various machines cutting guitars on Youtube I'm generally left underwhelmed. I think it is most likely that I come from a purely woodworking background and metalwork is a foreign world to me. But what I actually need is a woodworking machine, I couldn't care less about aluminium (above and beyond any I need to machine to produce the CNC itself).

The only truly satisfactory results I've seen to date have been on HAAS-type machines. I've obviously been managing my expectations and ruled out anything in that league. And then suddenly I see this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLNeA1oUCGc

This is the first time I've seen a desktop machine doing exactly what I hoped I could do. So I start trying to pick it apart - why is this machine doing what I require while I see no evidence that others are? Hard to see on the video, and the manufacturer K2CNC is now kaput. I follow some breadcrumbs and find some images of the machine:

https://www.hmres.com/site/images/pr...-8e6f-87f6.jpg

Looks OK, but pretty unremarkable. Yes its got square rails, yes, its probably using ball screws, yes it doesn't use steel, yes, its only using a single screw for the long axis, yes, it doesn't look all that sturdy. The only two remarkable things I notice are:

1 - Monster spindle - I don't know what power, but looks to be at least 3kW
2 - SERVOS!!!!

You can probably guess where my mind is going - and it does relate to my earlier whinging about everyone else using what I consider to be "small" cutters. I really want to use the cutters that I understand, and these are mostly big, multi-flute affairs. Now, my understanding is that I need to have substantial feed rates to generate good chips in such situations. My early research suggests steppers can certainly yield the same torque as servos, but also that servo's reach peak torque at high speeds, while steppers reach peak torque at low/zero speeds. Servos match my personal experience of hand-routing wood - a certain minimum feed rate is necessary to achieve controllable and clean cuts.

I get the impression that servos are a little rarer in most builds here and I understand they bring lots of extra cost and complexity. I'm particularly concerned that if I go down the servo route I may be out in no-man's land and perhaps less able to rely on the expertise of people here. Is there anyone here who can hold my hand a little and give me some advice about servos?

I may well be wrong, maybe steppers are perfectly sufficient, but I can now only convince myself of this if I can see them producing similar results to the above youtube link. At the end of the day, if I can't expect that sort of performance, I don't think I can justify investing so much time in a custom build!