Originally Posted by
pfmcnamara
Hi everyone, I've been lurking for a few months on the Forum and have found it incredibly valuable. I'm about to build my first CNC machine and was hoping to get some advice/opinions regarding motor control. First a bit about me and then a bit about my machine.
I'm an amateur luthier with 20+ years of hobby experience who is turning pro when I retire in a few years. Even as a pro, I will remain a low volume producer (15 to 25 unit per year). I work mostly in wood, but also build tools and fixtures in Aluminum. My necks and bodies require 3D organic surfaces. I've been using a CNC machine (ShopBot) for a few years at the local TechShop, but I now want to own one (for a lot of reasons). I've got an engineering and computer science background and I'm reasonably comfortable with electronics. I'm willing to spend a bit of time building from kits, but anything more than 40 +/- hours assembling a control system gets to be a bit too much.
At first, I was planning to order the CNC Router Parts Pro4848 with the plug-n-play NEMA 23 control system and the plug-n-play spindle. But I've been reading a lot about the Clearpath SDSKs. I'm entertaining the idea of SDSKs, Centroid Acorn Control kit, the CNCPro Pro4848 and the CNCRP Plug-n-Play spindle. But its turning into a real budget-buster. The SDSKs + Acorn + Centroid power supplies + NEMA enclosure + misc supplies is ~$3000 vs $1549 for the CNCRP plug-n-play motor control + $175 for Mach3.
So my question is: what are the real benefits of the Clearpaths and Acorn vs the Pplug-n-play NEMA 23s? I understand the "features" -- higher torque, quieter operation, faster rapids, etc., but I'm unsure whether those features would translate into real-world benefits given my use case (guitar building). I produce relatively small parts so I don't do long traverses. I don't hog huge amounts of material. My machine utilization will be ~200 hours per year. For me, "benefits" would be things like more precise guitar parts, faster job completion times, better surface finish, reduced maintenance (since constantly battling entropy seems to be one of the complaints with Mach3). I will say that once I get something working I absolutely hate fiddle futzing with software components simply to keep it working. So software stability is worth something to me. I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts.