NEMA 17's and the McWire.

It seems simple enough to modify the McWire design to use NEMA 17 sized steppers instead of the NEMA 23's that are listed. This would save a good deal of $$ and after a quick google search the NEMA 17 size motors are all over the place and can even be salvaged from older copy machines. Then you could work on modifying the Darwin motor mounts to fit 17's and have the McWire print them. Has any one adapted NEMA 17 sized steppers to the McWire?

I doubt there's a NEMA17 that has nearly enough torque to move the darwin z-axis upwards without any help.
Although I may be wrong with that, I'm unsure if that motor (high torque nema17) is much cheaper than the corresponding nema23.
And further more I'm pretty sure it can not be salvaged from any printer

Pay a penny more and salvage motors from old non working plotters not printers, than you will have a perfect NEMA23 bipolar stepper.. most likely even a dualshaft
Nick just posted pictures of his HP9872C plotter for example:
[photos.nickfines.co.uk]

see.. perfect motors for a darwin;
Also there are very old IBM printers out there (don't ask me what they are called)
which do have unipolar NEMA23 that show up on ebay very often (just three mounting holes... mostly sanyo denki) pretty cheap stuff, they are pretty okay for what we need too (unfortunately single shaft motors).

So well..yes;
if you do have some NEMA17 Motors laying around, go ahead and give them a try with your McWire, or even with your darwin,
but if you need to buy motors for this project, buy NEMA23

'sid

I was talking about the older xerox style office copy machines. I was reading on someones diy CNC blog where they said that they salvaged some NEMA 17 sized steppers from it.