Hi guys

Been a lurker for a long time. Made my first CNC router/mill about 11 years ago when I was in college, but have never been super thrilled about the performance.... Recently I picked up a bunch of servos, linear rails, ball screws, actuators, etc and I'm looking to use some of this to make a new machine without starting from scratch. Attached are pics of the actuators that I want to make use of. 15mm THK rails, 16mm diameter 16mm pitch ground ballscrews, 400w panasonic servos, 1um linear encoders. About 100lbs each

I'm looking to build a CNC mill that will devour aluminum, but also be able to machine steel at normal recommended feeds and speeds (instead of the just about grinding to dust I have to do on my non-stiff machine). Machine weight in the 500lb range with maybe 10" y travel and 20"x travel. I'm leaning toward making a new Y-axis base for the machine out of epoxy granite, then mounting one of these actuators on that as the X and another vertically as the Z.

My question pertains to the 16mm pitch primarily - I've been reading tons, but I can't really find great answers. I've done the calculations and it seems like the 400w servos will be fine moving and accelerating the loads at 16mm pitch, but I know pretty much everyone uses the 5mm pitch in a smaller cnc mill like this. At 3k RPM I would be moving at 1900ipm, which I couldn't really make use of, so it seems like I'm leaving a lot of torque on the table by using a 16mm lead instead of 5mm. The actuators are all assembled and extremely high precision - not sure what the specs on the ballscrew is, but based on the machine it came out of I'd guess toward the best. I could swap out the ballscrew but I'd prefer not to. I guess I'm looking for some real-world advice with regards to this setup since all calculations check out, but I could be missing something.

I also have a bunch of 750w panasonic or yaskawa servos that I could potentially use with a little bit of machining, but again I'd rather stick with the 400w if adequate.

Second question - is there any good hobby/light industrial controllers out there that would accept a second encoder input for each axis (for the linear encoders)? Side note - I installed some of the extra 1um encoders on my manual mill as a DRO and I had to limit the decimal places it was displaying to stop me from trying to hit .0000 dead nuts every move.

Thanks in advance for any and all advice/help