Can I wire 2 stepper motors together?

[crandolph]

So I got the TB6560 board from hubbard cnc and I'm building a 4ftx4ft plasma table. My question is can I wire together 2 stepper motors into on stepper driver for my x axis? I know I can slave channels in mach3 but that sometime gets out of sync and then a pendant controller doesn't respect that binding so i want to just wire two motors into one controller? Assuming I have the power will I have any problems doing it that way? Anyone else doing it?

My backup plan is to give up on the TB6560 board and go with separate drivers and join the pins at the parallel port but I'm cheap and I would like to do it on the driver output and not the driver input.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

[RomanLini]

It is not advisable to wire a chopping driver to two motors! The 2 motors can "fight" each other. Especially a small chip like a TB6560 that has very limited ability to handle either voltage transients or current overload peaks.

However your second suggestion should be safe; to use 2 separate stepper drivers, one driver for each motor, and join the step and dir pins to slave the 2 drivers together.

[crandolph]

Thanks for the warning. I actually found out that mach3 was doing a fine job slaving the 2 axis together it was just my parallel port wasn't giving out a clean signal. I upgraded to a better parallel port and it roared to life.