Samalt I have a digital tool machine I bought way back in the stone ages of 91 that uses rack and pinion on all the axis. They did it with a transmission setup. Not one reduction but three if I remember correctly. I ran 450 oz/in steppers at 1000 ipm with a man riding on the y axis gantry. Now admittedly in three weeks he had to send me another stepper motor as that one burned out but I routinely rapid at 300 ipm and cut up to the limit my porter cable router puts on me. I have just upgraded to the gecko 201 drive and the mach2 controller and still using the reduction transmission I can now carve at 300 ipm if the router motor will do it. I did a program comparision between the old controller and the new setup and I have now reduced my carving times by ten times. On one of the programs it used to take me 37 minutes to run because the full step system would set up an vibration in my machine and nearly shake it apart if I ran over 50 ipm cutting. Please understand this was using an interpolated program made up of lines that were about .050-.200 in in length. With the new system 300 ipm takes 3 min47 sec and there is no vibration.
Here is the transmission formula for my machine
1st gear 18 tooth
2nd gear 48 tooth
3rd gear 24 tooth
4th gear 80 tooth
final drive 2 Pi(1.5/2) this final gear is a 1.5" that sets in the rack.
Mike
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