for the past few months i've been agonizing over how to improve the speed a reliability of my Y axis.
Theres the back ground.
Swapped all screws to 1/2-10 5 start to help improve the speed, but was not happy with the lost resolution
Typically what i find while running production jobs is the origin slowly starts to drift - after about 20 -30 parts its off .020".
Beyond that, my rapid on the Y axis was only about 100ipm because the motors would sometimes stall.
The motors / drives when i first built my machine were poorly selected - live and learn.
Keling 425oz Nema 23's. Require 84v but i'm feeding them with 38v
Keling Stepper drivers which are limited to 40v max
I was up against replacing four drives, and getting a larger power supply.
Even though that would have been cheaper, I decided to try my hand with servos
Here is the machine
Here are the two Y axis motors
After much debate between the Gecko and Viper servo drives, I decided to go with the Viper 95 drive
Servo Motor I selected
Keling KL23-130-60 (NEMA23)
Skewed Rotor Design, 60V/20A
Constant Torque: 50 oz-in
Peak Torque: 350 oz-in
No load Speed: 4700 R.P.M
Terminal Voltage : 60 VDC
I'm still going to be driving these motors with my 38v power supply to help limit the RPM.
My goal is 4:1 reduction, and a max Rapid of 300 IPM. Based on the screw pitch, that will require 2,400 RPM
I searched high and low for an afforadable gear reduction system, but finally settled on this belt system i found on ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=250563161378
I'm hoping all these parts show up soon, so i can get things going.
I typically plan my upgrades around new production jobs and I have one coming up in a week or so that I need to be ready for.
First plan is to switch the Y axis, and then continue to convert the X and Z as money allows