Hey all, I'm fairly new to the forum so please be patient with me but I could use some expeirienced enlightenment.

My company bought an older stepper driven VICON 5'x10' plasma table for retrofit. (yes we can justify the time & the money) The machine has no controlls just the drive motors.

From what I've read, I'm pretty set on not using a straight open loop stepper system for the standard reasons. We've been looking into 3 options:

1. Standard servo system: Servo motor with gear box reducer (10arc/min or better) seperate servo drives. This option I think I know most of the pros & cons except gear box life expetancy? I talked with Walt at dynatorch and he claimed to have a customer with better than 7500 hours of use on his gearboxes with virtually no wear (under 6 arc/min)

2. smart servo motors: example: Dynatorch system. This is very apealing but aparently requires software specifically designed for smart servos which unfourtunatly are not all that common yet. Not very modular. The dynatorch software will work but that dos'nt leave room for a future change. The fact that the servo does not require support drives is very apealing. The motor connects to the controll PC via a serial cable (clean and simple or non-modular and obsucre?)

3. This option I know little about so any input here will be especially valued. Steppers with piggyback encoders and drives capable of making slip/skip corrections based on the encoder output. Closed loop operation right? Sounds like the best of both worlds. The stepper's synchrounouse controll of shaft movment and high tourq at reletivly low speeds coupled with a servo's ability to recalculate movement in real time incase of a slip/skip.

Servos require a big speed reduction for my application wheras steppers do not (2000-3000 rpm ~ vs ~ 100-300 rpm)(I see this as a signifigant atvantage in favor of the steppers)

whatda ya think?

What ever we go with needs to be mainsrteam enough to find upgrade and support info in the future.

One last question: Anyone here know what the hypertherm phenix cnc plasma controll software goes for?