Well it's been a busy day for the credit card. The drivers, steppers, ballscrews and nuts, bearings and mounts, spindle and vfd have all been bought mostly from China. I think I might have accidentally bought a collet set as well - I asked for a spindle with a ER20 collet and I think he's read that as "collet set". Not a problem though as I was going to buy a set anyway, I hadn't realized Chai had started sell them. If anyone needs drag chain he seems to be doing some nice looking stuff at a reasonable price.

I've also been tempted over to the dark side, I installed LinuxCNC on one of the old machines I have kicking about last night and I have to say I like what I see. There were a couple of minor complications but over all it seems to be a nicely put together system. I ran the latency tests for a couple of hours with a fully stressed machine and achieved ~7,000ns max jitter so I think it should work quite well. The parallel port supports SPP, EPP, ECP and ECP + EPP modes. I've seen someone mention that one of EPP or ECP is better but I can't find the thread again.

I was looking closely at the electronics in Jonathans "sufficiently strong" build and I can't see a BOB anywhere in the control box. In fact it looks like the drivers are connected directly to the parallel port with the cable being wrapped in a bit of foil. Is that correct? I've not been able to find all that much mention of people running steppers direct from the parallel port, just the odd post here and there but I wouldn't mind giving it a go. As has been mentioned elsewhere I can always move onto using an ESS + BOB if necessary but I might as well give it a shot.