I also had to make sure the stepper motor had enough torque to drive the cutter. Stepper motor control is an open loop control system. You are sending pulses to move the motor and assume the motor is doing what you command. If the motor is overloaded and starts missing steps you have no way of knowing. MEGS was duly placed back on top of the bench, literally dusted off and a stepper motor was fitted in place of the old motor. This merely required drilling some new holes in the motor mount to fit the spacing of the stepper motor. Also needed was a square of 2mm thick ABS sheet to fit over the register on the flange of the motor, photo 33. This allowed the motor to be more squarely mated to the motor mount. Using the spare Stepper motor driver already fitted in the electronics cabinet, another XLR cable was made up. The program was rewritten and after a small amount of fine tuning a gear blank was setup in the machine and with fingers crossed MEGS was set running. Slowly and surely a gear was hobbed! I cut a few gears in different modules to test everything was functioning, photo 34.
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