I promise I will stop asking daft question soon. Ish.

[irving2008]

By all means buy the CNC Cookbook, but you'll get a lot more useful & detailed info from here. Its a bit basic and out of date (2009) in many areas and a lot of things are glossed over, like pros and cons of microstepping for example. In fact that subject gets 1 line in the book and not even a index entry!

[D.C.]

By all means buy the CNC Cookbook, but you'll get a lot more useful & detailed info from here. Its a bit basic and out of date (2009) in many areas and a lot of things are glossed over, like pros and cons of microstepping for example. In fact that subject gets 1 line in the book and not even a index entry!

It wasn't a slur on the quality of the information on this site but I have zero experience with this sort of stuff and I'll be happier when I have a basic grasp of the fundamentals. In that situation I normally find an academic textbook/guide is useful as it covers all the fundamental topics in a logical order (or they should!) and gives you something to build on. At the moment I'm kinda grasping at threads of information and trying to knit them together randomly.

For example in one of the build logs a tip is given about the positioning of the screw in relation to the rail, I would like to actually know this stuff and the mechanics behind it to work it out instead of stumbling across nuggets of information and thinking 'oh yeah, of course'.

I'll see if the library has a copy if it's not worth buying and in the mean time dust off my old Sadler and Thorning 'Understanding Mechanics' that has been sitting on the shelf untouched for years.