As you guys probably know I keep preaching the mantra that bigger stepper motors do not always equal better stepper motors. I use and recommend 166 oz-in motors for Taigs and some folks always insist that you have to use 270 to 387 oz-in motors or a Taig just won't work properly.

I was doing some feed-rate testing tonight and though I would see how fast I could get my Taig going. I am using the 166 oz-in motors I sell, with a G540 and a MeanWell 48V power supply, and a SmoothStepper. Generally I have the motors tuned to a max velocity of 40 IPM as nothing I do requires any faster rapids than that.

I first tried 100 IPM and the mill worked fine. I upped the X axis to 150 IPM, then 200 IPM, then 250 IPM, finally at 300 IPM it quit! 250 IPM is kind of scary as there is a lot of vibration from the lead screw.

The moral of the story is that choosing components that are well matched will always work better than just slapping on the largest motor you can. I made a short crappy video with my cell phone, I'll shoot a better one at a later date: http://soigeneris.com/Documents/Taig_250IPM.3gp .

Wow. It really goes. I don't know CNC from bean pudding, but I can see that the table gets from one side to the other in a pretty zippy manner!

That's way fast! Those motors are spinning at 5000 RPM to get going that fast!

About the best I've been able to get is 75 IPM with my Keling ~280 IPM motors (G203v 48v PSU). Well, 75 with reliability and also with very fast acceleration. Just for additional safety margin I set them to 60ish.

I've been wanting one of those SmoothSteppers for a while, expect an order from me in the near future!

I am running a 1ghz machine with mach3 and no matter what it will not run my machine any faster than 40ipm with a g540, maybe I should try emc to see if that performs any better than mach3 anyone else compared the two performance wise?

I shot a few other videos today that are a bit higher quality. I got some flak from a guy on CNC zone as he thought the SmoothStepper was magically making the stepper motor more powerful so I hooked it up to the parallel port with a kernel frequency of 60 kHz (the best my old 1.5 gHz processor can handle).

With a 1gHz processor you won't be able to have a high enough kernel frequency to go any faster through the parallel port. You need a faster machine or a SmoothStepper.

The machine would do 90 IPM at this kernal speed.

http://www.youtube.com/v/tYn9lCgZPEw

http://www.youtube.com/v/RzrBcXCNDhU

http://www.youtube.com/v/Fo-9qYWopCE

Wow....Now thats a Rapid

Thanks for the Vids