UK stepper motor supplier

Can someone personally recommend a decent UK supplier of stepper motors who sell good products at a reasonable price & could offer technical help if needed.

I want this to complete a project whose only problem is that the Chinese supplied stepper motor which is rated at 4Nm is only giving about 2/3rds of that, I’m pretty sure wiring etc. is correct.

Thanks,

Tony

CNC4you are at the Midlands ME show in a week or so might be worth a chat with them if you are going. I am going to talk to the about a rotary table project.

Don't know of anyone offering technical help beyond a website, or even a shop selling steppers that can be visited. Sign of the times I'm afraid! But there are several experienced stepper users on the forum who can probably advise.

My number one suspect would be the power supply. For convenience and cheapness I run my steppers from LED PSUs. They work OK but aren't ideal because they're voltage stabilised and designed to feed a constant load. Steppers are pulse driven and a stabilised supply trying hard to keep the output at a constant voltage may not deliver the wildly varying current needed to maintain torque. These supplies often have current limiting circuitry; that's great for LEDs but is likely to throttle a motor under heavy load. A basic transformer supply with plenty of amps and simple rectifier and capacitor might be a better option. Which motor are you using and how it is powered?

Dave

Old school, thanks i'm not going but will give them a look.

SOD. Bit of a confession, I'm working on the Clough42 [Youtube] electronic lead screw, my son has done all the electrical/programming side of things & I have done the mechanical bits, everything works apart from the under powered motor.

He is in Portugal for a week so I was trying to help out, I will get the information you have asked for but it may take some time, thanks for your assistance!

Tony

Hi,

Motor is 24HS39-3008D [**LINK**], power supply is JC-240-48 48V 5A, [JC Power] going into a DM556 microstep driver.

Hope that makes sense.

Tony

I've used Motion Control Products professionally with no issues

https://www.motioncontrolproducts.com/

Head office is in Bournemouth

Robert G8RPI.

Edited By Emgee on 06/10/2019 12:28:42

Zapp Automation have a decent selection.

It does, and the combination is pretty much what I would have bought. Not quite perfect maybe, but I would certainly expect it to work. A few points:

• The 8-wire motor should be wired bipolar rather than unipolar. (I expect it is.) As a fancy point of detail, if the torque is wanted most at low speed, the windings should be in series, parallel if more torque is wanted at high speed. May be worth trying parallel for more power.
• The motor should has a 70% duty cycle to avoid overheating. 2.8Nm happens to be 70% of 4.0Nm, perhaps a coincidence!
• The power supply is the stabilised type I said wasn't ideal but it has plenty of volts and amps, better than I pay for! I'd be surprised if it's the problem.
• The DM556 controller is a little underpowered for the motor. Although the motor pulls 4.24A and the DM556 peaks at 5.6A, the controller limits to 4.0A RMS. Even so I would still expect the motor to get close to full torque.

Is the problem holding or turning torque? 4Nm is the motor's maximum holding, and it's turning torque falls off with rpm. If the problem is turning torque at high rpm, the motor is on the small side. This graph shows the torque down by nearly 50% at 600rpm when the motor is at 36V. Again, this doesn't look obviously wrong to me.

Last suggestion: the booby trap that gets me every time is the current setting DIP switches on the DM556 controller. These should be set to maximum. Anything lower will restrict the motor.

Hope that helps. I can't see anything obviously wrong.

Dave

Thanks to all who replied! Will report back.

The motor is being used to drive the lead screw/feed shaft on a Warco WM290V so not very fast maybe 200-400 rpm, just seems under powered a bit?

Tony