EG - Moglice, Poly PBM, various others - most of which don't seem to be
so proud of their low prices that I can find any place with prices
listed - all "call us", which I associate with "if I have to call and
ask, I probably can't afford it"...

I can't find any of these products in McMaster/MSC/Enco, but I may
simply not have the right search terms at my fingertips - I'd think one
of them would carry at least one brand of the stuff.

Thinking about casting acme nuts for a small woodwork (not super
precision) CNC (trying to get more life out of the old shop-bot (which
is a bit sketchy about where it's at with the old cable/encoder system)
by making a smaller acme screw arrangement for the old
steppers/controller to drive.

I'm assuming that if I want UPS shipping I need to stick with Enco's 3
foot leadscrews - would like the 6 foot, the price is fine, but I don't
want to get into truck shipment - it's a huge hassle here. I could get a
lot of work done in the smaller space if I can get the machine to the
point where it can run without too much babysitting - right now it needs
a lot of babysitting. I also need to figure out an affordable spindle
that's about a million times quieter than a universal-motor router,
unless I build it in a bunker 50 feet away from the shop - the few times
I have had the old thing running happily, it was awful to be anywhere
near while it worked.

All can of course be solved by the application of large quantities of
money, but that's not the route I would prefer to go, lacking it, and
lacking a solid income stream for the thing - it's always been a hobby
machine, with the hope that I might get it together to the point where
it made some money and bought itself a replacement, but thus far it's
been too finicky to make reliable progress on the money-making front.

I've been dipping into cnczone, but I find it very fragmented - is there
a better place to start for DIY HSM CNC machine info?

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by