Well, I finally did it. I found and bought a CNC lathe off Ebay, shipping it from Florida to Alaska. The base is an old mini computer from the mid 80s with some nice electrical parts inside, complete with a 40 meg hard drive the size of a shoebox and an 8" floppy drive.



Mechanically it seems fine or fixable, but the breakout board and the stepper drives are missing. The toroidal transformer works, supplying 45V DC across the capacitor and 26.1V AC to the motor board.



I am not sure if the motor board works as I did not test it before I went back to work for a couple weeks. I have no reason to suspect it is bad.



I'm wide open to advice, but I plan to run it with an old Windows XP computer running Mach 3 to a CNC4PC C11G breakout board with Gecko G201x stepper drives. This seems to be a common upgrade path judging by older relevant posts. I basically picked the 201X stepper drives out of a hat - I'm not sure what is best in this situation.

I can't read the scrubbed labels on the old NEMA 23 stepper motors and I assume they are 25 year old 70 in-lbs motors. I plan on upgrading them after I get this machine going.



I've looked over old posts, but I can't figure out if that power supply will run higher power stepper motors. How can you determine what a power supply is capable of delivering?

What would be an optimal torque motor given this power supply and lathe bed/cross slide construction?

Is this an optimal component combination (Mach 3, C11G BoB, G201X stepper drives). I know you get what you pay for, but is there a cheaper alternative?