MakerBot Industries

Ah thanks, I will give these a try a little later today. You the man Jetguy!

See my other post about the stepper REF voltage. I hate to tell anyone to spend money but the new stepper motors are pretty much a "must have"!

I'm not positive but I may have already got these, even though I ordered my ToM back in April. I'm not sure what they normally sounded like, but my ToM is pretty quiet, and the Z motor just gets barely warm to the touch. Unlike what I heard other saying that it is really hot. I did lower my REF to 0.6V though on X and Y and the Makerbot specs on the others. I will have to look at this a bit closer now, as Makerbot says that if you ordered before 5/15 then you don't have these. Well as far as it goes I'm satisfied with what I have atm. I can barely here the thing operating from 15 ft away. Z is the loudest right now, and that's going to be better I'm sure as soon as I do your Z upgrade. :)

Ok, lets be clear on the upgrade and what it does. The older stepper motors have high enough resistance and inductance that they were designed to self limit current through the coils. This works OK at best and severely reduces the amount of torque as speeds increase due to the large inductance further limiting voltage and current through the coil. In order to be a strong magnet, you need current, but current come from voltage divided by resistance and inductance acts like resistance. This means that even when you lowered the ref voltage, you lowered the amount of current and thus the strength of the motor.

Ed did a lot of math to figure out the mass of the whole moving carriage takes more oomph than the old motors could provide reliably and lowering the REF value decreases the motor's strength below that. This means you will skip steps at some point during a long print-even worse now that you lowered the REF. I know, I wasted several 6 hour long prints and was extremely upset.

The new motor has much lower inductance and thus doesn't fight the current like the old motor does-thus having way more reserve torque. Trust me on this, there is a huge difference. Ed and I wouldn't waste our time on trying higher voltage or different motors if this wasn't true.