Re: Digest Number 350

Hello All:
First, I am no machinist or techy. But I have an interest in home hobby
shop machining and CNC. I use a Mac mostly, but I have an old IBM 486 100
MHz, 36 Meg Ram, 8x CD, 8 Gig HD laying in my gun room collecting dust. Now I
can't seem to find much info in the way of CNC for the Mac other than Virtual
Gibbs, an AuraCad/Cam, even though there is a lot of Mac CAD programs for it.
So I have resigned myself to digging out the old 486 and brushing the dust
off it. Also I have a Grizzly 12 x 37 lathe, and their large Bench mill/drill
with power feed for equipement. I have a few dumb questions to ask of you
people in the know.

#1 Which is better, steppers or servo drives?
#2 What is the aproximate cost of each type of motor?
#3 What size and brand of motors would you recomend for my size lathe and
mill?
#4 Do you have to buy a certain board to work with certain software or are
they unversal?
#5 Which board/software combos do you recomend?
#6 What kind of cost for the boards/software?
#7 What companies offer catalogs for these kind of parts, motors, boards,
ball screws, etc.
#8 Has anyone done this already in this group to my brand of machines?
#9 Lets say theoretically I may have access to a copy of MasterCam 7.2 on CD,
is all I need is the stepper/servo board to work with it, the
stepper/servo motors and a ball screw for my mill?
Rich
Armilite@...