Originally Posted by
routalot
To clarify,I intend to apply a coat of sanding sealer in due course.The steppers are 230 oz/inch Nema 23 's and have far more power than I can use but I don't think I would want to go smaller.I am operating without homing switches and it works quite well as long as I don't do part of a job and then go back another day after switching off the computer.To make it a bit easier I have placed pencil marks on the machine to indicate where an approximate home position is and when I activate LinuxCNC it insists that I enter a home position before allowing me to do anything.By making sure the marks are in place it is normally quite close.I then use the workpiece to determine a job offset.I have run items that were modelled at a point in space that would be outside the machine's working envelope if the home position was used as a zero datum.By using the "touch off" facility and entering a suitable global coordinate,it all works unless the dimensions of the workpiece exceed the values entered in the machine parameters.
I do have both inductive switches and basic roller actuated physical switches to choose from and intend to use one or the other once I have grasped enough of the necessities of the homing parameter setup and then located the switches and their operating mechanisms.
I strongly recommend downloading some software for engraving and other operations and starting the learning process.F-engrave has been a very useful find for me and I am working at learning more about the Freecad path module.