Hi everyone. New guy here.

I have some projects to do and was planning to farm out the CNC work but with all the prototyping and setup charges it might be more cost effective to get a machine myself. Of course, once I started looking on eBay and some of the commercial sites one thing leads to another and now I'm thinking of building my own.

So here I am now, with a design for a CNC router dancing in my head and a bunch of questions. I'm not a mechanical engineer and have never done anything like this, so I think I'll fit right in.

My question (right now) is about motor selection for the Z axis. Hopefully this is the right forum for this question (too many forums to choose from).

It seems from everything I've seen so far that all the motors on a CNC machine are sized the same. I can understand that the X and Y axis would need equal amounts of power (or torque) to pull the router through the material being cut. However, is it really necessary for the Z axis to be sized the same?

That is, does plunging a bit into a given material require the same effort as moving the bit laterally through that material?