MONDO Stepper Wiring

Gentlemen,

I've been reading the "stepper wiring" thread with interrest, and have
found it most helpful, being a beginner at this. I'm hoping you can
help me with my own stepper wiring project.

Some time ago, I bought a couple of industrial micro-positioning x-y
tables and their(?) large control cabinets (as scrap), planning on
someday using them for parts to build cnc machine tools. The time has
come, but I was not prepared to find that each stepper motor has 12
wires. There are 2 pairs of motors in two sizes. The smaller motors
are

Astrosyn Stepper
Type 23pr-E202-03
2.0 v/phase no. 9x11

The larger motors are

Astrosyn Miniangle Stepper
Type 34PR-F001
2.0 v/phase
2.33/1.27 A/phase
0.45 degrees/step

The wires from both types of motors are

Black
Black and White
Green
Green and White
Blue
Blue and White
Red
Red and White
Brown
Orange
Yellow
White

Neither motor is listed on Astrosyn's website.

Has anyone come across these before? From your replies to the "stepper
wiring" thread, I'm guessing that there are 4 center-tapped windings,
yielding the 12 wires. From this, I could wire the 4 center taps
together and drive the 8 resulting 'phases' directly from the printer
port using power transistors, but I would need one parallel port per
axis, and this would limit the number of devices that could be
controlled, and the choices of software I could use to drive them.

Have I got it right so far? I haven't removed the steppers from the
tables yet to do resistive measurements- I wanted to get a better
handle on things before I started dismantling, and the larger table
requires my engine hoist to move around(200+lbs)- You never know when
someone may need a 1" precision table to mount an engine block on.

I would rather drive these steppers with a step-direction controller,
but I haven't yet seen a circuit on the web for an 8 phase motor, let
alone one with 12 leads. Does anyone even make a chip for this? Could
I wire the coils in four pairs of two coils to provide more torqe and
less accuracy, and use a more conventional control chip? If so, does
anyone know which leads should be wired together, or how I would
determine this? Are there any suitable chips at Radio Shack(herressy,
I know, but they are local, and I could do this faster)?

If it helps at all, the cabinets that came with the tables are labeled

PEM SIX LORAN

SODICK SYSTEM-LORAN

HODEN SYSTEM
ORBITING SYSTEM with an attached placard SYSTEM HIGH LORAN


Thankyou for any advice or help you can offer.

Jeff Hayes