Which Stepper Motor?

[The Gresley Luthier]

Hi, I am a newbie to this forum, in fact it is my first Thread, so please be gentle with me.

I am building my own CNC wood router, for cutting and shaping guitar bodies and other wooden parts, I have limited space in my man cave, so I have gone with an initial design with a work area of 800mm x 600mm using 16mm Linear Rails. My problem is I cannot decide if I should use NEMA 17's or NEMA 23 's, Stepper Motors, mainly because NEMA 23's appear a lot more expensive than NEMA 17's (I am retired on a Pension) The hardest wood I will be cutting will probably be Alder & Basswood for the bodies, I sometimes use Mahogany, Maple or Rosewood for Guitar Fingerboards, this usually involves very little heavy work

All advice would be gratefully appreciated, I hope I have provided enough information.

Regards.

Ray

[the great waldo]

Make sure your z axis can pull your cutter high enough. You'd be surprised at how much z axis height you need if your'e cutting out a les paul body which is 63 mm thick + if you have a baseboard/wasteboard and the cutter needs some free space to move over the wood blank. Do your'e summs. The size of the stepper motor dictates the size of the cutter you can use. With a 6mm router bit you wouldn't need a super strong stepper. Your powersupply will also dictate the size of your stepper. My ancient old Makko M850 probably has 2nm motors and it works albeit slowly. I think 3nm should be more than enough
https://www.omc-stepperonline.com/cl...op-stepper-kit
https://www.sorotec.de/shop/CNC-Mill...lling-Kits-en/
I've bought a sorotec compact line kit quite a while ago (i have'nt found the time to put it together yet ) and they recommend 3 nm . Try and get closed loop motors if you can or even servos. I think you'll probably get more low speed torque on the closed loop(don't quote me on that ) A decent stiff machine is the most important thing with cnc. Lower powered motors mean everything is a little slower, but if the machine is rigid you'll get a good cut finish. Sorotec has some good spiral wood cutter that are not to expensive. Don't think you'll be knocking out guitars like Fender!! there's quite a learning curve. It is nice to watch a router cut the fret slots, although it might be quicker by hand.
Cheers Andrew

[the great waldo]

I forgot to mention nema 23 are pretty much the standard. 800 x 600 base board won't give you a 800 x 600 cutting size , you are going to lose a bit because of the way the spindle is mounted on the z axis. As for controllers I use a cnc drive uccnc 100 usb motion controller https://www.cncdrive.com/UC100.html although I will be upgrading to AXBBE controller. The uccnc software is straight forward to use and they have a lot of information on their forum https://forum.cncdrive.com/
Cheers
Andrew

[The Gresley Luthier]

Hi "the great waldo" many thanks for your advice, much appreciated. I have decided to go with ARDUINO UNO + DT556T for the Stepper Controllers, I am familiar with ARDUINO, and I have several in my shed.

Regards.

Ray

[the great waldo]

Hi Ray

Good luck with your project, let us know how you get on.
Cheers
Andrew