Small lathe conversion

Steppers if well sized will do the job and the overall wiring and complexity of the work will be much less. Expense will also be less, BUT if someday will will run out of position or the parts do not comply for what you are expecting, you will get your head bouncing thinking: what is wrong? The stepper, the coupler, the screw, the nut, the calibration, did I saved the tool table ????

You can also place encoders on the stepper, but if you reach that point then your should started with the servo.

In resume, and in my opinion, if you plan to learn and play with your machine go to steppers, if you plan to do actual work on it go for servos.

The closed-lop stepper systems seem to give very similar performance to a servo, at a very much lower cost.
Not that I have ever used one, my last lathe conversion uses 1kW servos.

There are many small CNC systems on small machines as you propose running open loop service and I have a friend who has a slightly larger lathe (38mm spindle bore) that has worked that way for years. He's using a small NEMA 34 on the long feed and a NEMA 23 on cross feed. I think your sized machine is well inside stepper territory.

I think if I started again, I would look at closed loop steppers and matching controllers. You have so much to learn, steppers will simplify the journey on your first build.

Or as said, I would look at servos to increase my understanding of CNC machines.

Not to hijack the thread, but today i did a quick and dirty retrofit of a smal lathe ( 20 mm bore, Rod ).

Will attach some bad pictures in a while, i need food.

Pictures attached.

Well that all is a lot to consider. Every CNC I have ever used was a servo system, but we are talking machine shop (slant bed lathe and machine center stuff) not home. I bought this small lathe to make parts for hotrods and hobby toys with the occasional paying job mixed in. I do not have a lot of space or I would have bought a full size machine not table top. That said I have already been asked about making parts for people. I am new to building CNC machines but not running them. I like the closed loop stepper drives you posted Andy, that is the direction I think I would like to go, was really looking at servos because of my own experience. I will probably only go that direction if it will work with a small form factor pc and some motion card. I looked at the leadshine ebay link, the only reservations I have with something like that is the power of the stepper in the nema 23 range listed 283 oz/in. I will do some research in that direction and other offerings. Any other advice is welcome. Thank you all for the help.

Biersmythe wrote: the only reservations I have with something like that is the power of the stepper in the nema 23 range listed 283 oz/in.

This is my old lathe with 2Nm Nema 23 steppers:

But I did replace that lathe with another with 1kW servos.

Rapids are clearly much faster, and the feed and cut is very conservative in the second example. (I don't seem to have any videos of it working properly)