Hello!
I want to make an upgrade on my cnc 3018, it ls a CNC (designed to be used for carving/milling) and i want to upgrade the stepper motors. I have 3x nema 17 12v 0.3A but i could not found on the world wide web how faster they can run, max speed…
If i’ll buy 3x stepper motors 12v 2.7A or with
nema 23 would they run faster? If i upgrade the stepper motors do i have to uprgade my control board?
The biggest issue I have seen with the 3018 is that they use 1600 steps per mm - the micro-stepping on the motor drivers is set very high, meaning that the controller has to send many steps to move even a small amount.
8 bit GRBL is limited to a maximum (official) stepping frequency of about 30000 steps per second, which means you likely can’t make your motors move faster than about 25mm per second unless you can figure out how to reduce the micro stepping on the motor drivers.
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can I buy some other motors that would fit on my 3018 or what should I do ? Now i dont have quite so much money to invest in a CO2 laser or another diode laser that moves faster… i want to upgrade this one that i already have… Any ideas?
The motors aren’t the limitation - it’s the motor drivers, and how they are set on the controller in your control board. If you can lower (half) the micro-step value in the X & Y motor drivers, you will be able to double the speed the motors can move.
The true problem here is that your machine was made to be a CNC milling machine, and it was never intended to go fast. The hardware is pre-set for slow, accurate movement, and slow acceleration, because CNC milling has side loads - it goes slow, with good torque and power. A laser is very light and does not carry much weight, so there are very different design decisions made when building machine for laser use than when building it for CNC use.
Buying a CNC milling machine to use as a laser is a little like buying a moving van to race in F1 - neither machine is “wrong”, they are just made for very different things.
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yea…the thing is when i bought this cnc 3018 i wanted to do stuffs that now i am doing with this laser, i added my 5.5mw laser to the same order but i didnt tought that i could so so many cool stuffs with the laser, i am not even using the spindle motor anymore since i discovered how to use the laser 
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