I think one of the problems with the quil and the knee is the backlash in both drive trains. Most of these machines I've seen CNC'd have some kind of external bracket with ballscrew that grips the quil and ensures there's little to no backlash. Some use direct to quil but i think often they get modded to use a ballscrew to get around backlash.

Like you say the Knee is just raised by hand to some level near what's required befroe starting job.

When you say NEMA case what do you mean exactly.? I use these http://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Main_Ind...res/index.html