Did I fry my thc?

There’s no extra holes, but I’m sure I could make nema 23 work.
Looks like I’d have to remove the whole z axis to remove the mounting plate, but I think a could just as easily make a template to drill/tap some accurate hole in situ.
I just measured, the holes are about 2” on center so they may land right where they’d interfere with nema 23 holes.
But I’m sure I could adapt it some how, or use nuts and bolt, or maybe even twist the hole pattern.
I’m fabricator so I can make most things work. I’d feel more comfortable making a z axis from scratch than I do controlling it

No joy there, But it would not be hard to make a conversion plate to mount a 57mm/60mm servo or stepper if you did want to go with a Mesa solution.
You might be able to retain the stall homing if you write a custom homing module.

You could likely drive the DC motor with a simple HBridge,
but I suspect the simplest path forward would be to add
a step motor and drive + limit switches.
 

Exploring the h bridge route, there’s 2 common drives I see that may work.
L298n- Seems like the 2.6amp motor would be pushing the limit, but I assume id only get 2.6amps when it stalls, so maybe it can handle it.
cytron 10a- Way more amps than required. I guess I don’t understand if the motor will only draw what it needs or if the cytron could send too much current for the motor.
I’m sure there’s 100’s of different drivers out there, so maybe I should continue looking.
Am I on the right track?
If I did get a driver like one of these, can I easily use the stall force as a limit as a back up to the ohmic sensing?
 

The 2.6A is probably for continuous torque. you will typically need about 3 or 4
times this rating from the HBridge for peak torque, so a 10A HBridge is not
unreasonable.

The control loop in LinuxCNC will only supply the needed torque (so near 0 current when idle)

The stall detection would be tricky unless the HBridge has an overcurrent sense output
A home switch would be likely easier at least linuxCNC setup wise

I just ordered a cheapo hbridge.
I doubt its quality or even a good choice, but I’m hoping I might learn something along the way.
If I can get it to work, great. If not, I’ll start looking into servo/steppers drivers or maybe try that other z I was offered.
I took apart the hypertherm thc controller just for fun. 
I know just enough to look at their board and identify some of their h bridge components but I don’t know enough to use them to make circuit. Maybe I’ll learn enough to give that a shot one of these days.
Once again, I appreciate the help.
Rod, I know you’re consistently telling me the easy way to do this stuff, but I’m stubborn enough that I do things the hard way, and often fail, before I give the easy way a chance.

Noooooooooooo L298, it has no current limiting, can do only 2A and it heats like on fire.
Get the bts7960, can do 40A, costs twice as much as L298, often less. Usually 2 of them on the same board so can do 2 motors at once.
Or skip that and get a cheap stepper drive, the so called TB6600 with the TB67S109, does 3.5A and has current limiting and microstepping, so everything you need, for about 12$.

Well for once I didn’t pick the worst choice.
I actually did get something with a bts7960.
Can I use a tb6600 w/ tb67s109 for a dc motor? I assumed those would only work for steppers.

So I actually don’t understand what signals I can send. I bought a 7i97t cause it can send the analog signal to the preexisting servos on the machine.
I see most stepper drives want step/dir signals, although some will take cw/ccw.
Im not sure how or if I can send those on the 7i97t. Or even the r-pwm/l-pwm that I think the bts7960 wants, although I’m pretty sure I can do that.

I guess I think I can send step/dir on the regular outputs on the 7197t, but I don’t have many of those, although, I’m not using all of them.
but I’ve only used 2 of the 6 analog drive outputs, so I feel like I should use those for some reason.