Wood, metal, plastic???

So after getting some motors and other goodies from the photocopiers yesterday, I decided to try to throw some stuff together to begin the frame for the machine.  I spend a decent amount of time measuring, drawing, drilling, sanding, and cutting to try to make the corner supports for the frame.  The plan is to hack them together from random material and then print better ones made out of ABS plastic once the machine is up and running.  That way the machine will be able to build parts to improve itself (kinda cool, huh?).  Here is the first attempt at making these

I was obviously not too excited about this.  As you can see the wood actually split on the final hole.  After going through the hassle of making this and then having it split after all that work I pretty much abandoned wood as a working material.  I think I am going to stick to plastic or ideally metal for the first batch of parts.  Thankfully, my school has a room full of scrap material from the machine shop so I will probably scavenge some aluminum blocks from there to use for these supports.  

I also finally got the motors out of their housings and got a chance to look for some specs online to see what kind of torque and amperage requirements these things have.  Here is a shot of the 4 steppers I got out of the first 2 printers

As it turns out, 3 of them are all from the same KH series of motors.  Here is a link to the specs (http://www.dynetics.eu/CMS/Docs/japan%20servo%20pdf/japan%20servo%20stappenmotoren.pdf).  They appear to have torques up near the 80 oz*in range which make them suitable for my machine.  It looks like current requirements are up near the 2 Amps range as well which means I'm going to have to make a better motor driver than the 1 Amp H-bridge that I was planning to use.  100 oz*in torque for the motors would have been ideal, but hey they were free!  Next up is to test them to see if they even work.  Being that the machines were scrap there is no way of knowing until I actually get a chance to run some current through them and see if we can get some movement!