Help With a number of build issues & uncertaintities

[JAZZCNC]

Hi Stu,

Ok well sorry to say this but that gantry and Z axis isn't really upto the job of cuttung anything harder than cardboard. To be honest the whole machine is flimsy and I'd say only any good for very light work or plasma/laser cutting.
To cut wood properly with correct feeds and DOC then it will need to be beefed up considerably. Same goes for the Z axis it will struggle with heavy router hanging on the end and this will show in the quality of finish.
The base frame is also less than ideal with those long thin flimsy sides with no support or bracing from Bed to support them. Unfortunatly this design doesn't lend it's self to cutting anything hard so really IMO it's not much more than plotter or drag knife type machine.

Regards electronics then my advice is to buy Digital drives as they are so much better than analog drives at handling resonance and give much smoother motors. Can't accurately advise which without knowing more about motors you have and the voltage run intend to run them at.?
Also don't buy a cheap Break out board(BOB) as BOB's are one of the single biggest sources of trouble and hair pulling.!!

I can say that based on the light weight of the machine that most 50Vdc drives run with approx 2nm motors around 42-44Vdc would easily be enough.
If you want upgrade abilty then look to drives capable of 75-80Vdc and 3nm motors running around 68-70Vdc. These will suilt most machines upto 4 x4 with moderate sized gantry very nicely.

With Motion control then while USB is much better than parallel port Ethernet is better still and much more immune from noise and some of the power issues USB can suffer from. Devices powered from USB are pain for dropping signal due to power losses and they really should be run from an external PSU not the 5v provided by USB.
Don't try using USB to PP adaptors with Mach3 they won't work correctly causing all sorts of timing issues at best with high chance they won't work at all.
Also be aware the Mach3 parallel port drive doesn't work with Win7 64bit and the PP driver doesn't like running on laptops so only do this if your using an external motion control card.! . . .. Ethernet is by far the best IMO.

So sorry to be hard on the machine frame but I'm not known for blowing smoke up anyones arse and your best knowing sooner rather than later.