I'm hoping to get some feedback from the 3D printing buffs out there who

3D Printing
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I’m hoping to get some feedback from the 3D printing buffs out there who have experience with what are the best options for nema17 steppers.

So many options in the marketplace, prices are all over the place, and I am sure quality is as well. What are your absolute favorites?

The use case is not 3D printing, but for a PNP project that I built. Today it uses the nema17’s I stole from my shapeoko (Smart Automation SM42HT47-1684B) which seem to work pretty well. https://hackaday.io/project/9319-diy-pick-and-place

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Nothing against Wantai. I’ve used Kysan (that’s what Printrbot has been using) and these days mostly use the openbuilds motors which used to be LDO and is now Motech Motor, which I like the quality of the most.
People have said that stepperonline is not of good quality, I think they’re ok, but still recommend openbuilds. You can also contact the respective manufacturers on Alibaba if you want to get direct.

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I wouldn’t even care for this case. You probably won’t have any significant load you have to carry with these motors. If you want/need more precision than the standard motors deliver you might want to look for 400steps/rev (0,9° instead of 1,8° 200t/rev) motors but apart from that i think you won’t see a difference.

Apart from that it’s probably always a good idea not to go with the cheapest crap.

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Are you moving the gantry only from one side? How is that working out?

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@Jeff_DeMaagd yeah he’s got a driven and a non-driven Y side. Check the videos in the hackaday link, the motion seems really smooth and this topic was touched upon in his thread at OpenPNP Google group.

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@Jeff_DeMaagd yes, I have a passive rail. Works exceptionally well with high quality rails. The cheap chinese rails I tried had some binding issues, not major, but enough that placing 0402 parts would be really tough. In the build logs you can see the results of my tests, but basically the floating rail is pretty flawless.

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Ice used both wantai and kyansan. Never had an issue with either one but for some reason the wantai just felt a little more solid. Never seen a print quality difference thkugh

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Hmmm… not a fan of that bearing arruagement unless the passive side is a real float (just a poly pad on a flat surface) and the 2:1 rule is followed for the driving side…

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@Jerry_Rodberg I too was skeptical, and we did see missing steps with cheap bearings, but our current setup has been 100% accurate in the many boards we have placed so far. Time will tell how reliable it is, but so far it has been very good. We’ve got some IGUS drylin bearings that seem to have some slop, we’re not even going to attempt this kind of a setup for those, but instead will do the 2:1 thing and maybe look at a more cantilevered design.