Hood,
Thanks for providing yet another excellent reason for using servo motors! I am leaning that way for my next retrofit.
Ray,
Remeber that I am a newbee at this stuff, so I'm probably going to ask some stupid questions, and not understand some of the answers. Please don't take that as me being argumentitive. I appreciate your comments very much.
I dislike the homing operation. My modified Z axis is pretty tall (for a baby mill) and I almost never use the top of it, yet every home has to run the head all the way up while I wait impatiently. Same with the X axis. If the steppers loose steps for some reason, you go thru the whole process again.
Even though, as both myself and Hood pointed out, the OP has not explained his reasoning, I now have my own:
Yesterday I finished a preliminary run with my new 4th axis. It is a stepper powered spin index with a 5C 4" three jaw chuck. On the little baby X2, the rig takes up nearly half of the table. Yet to home, or re-home, I sit and wait for the whole rig to pass in front of me. It may be silly, but if I had to use that rig a lot, I would certainly consider setting up a set of limit switches that would eliminate the ride to the very end of the table, and only set zero at the beginning of the actual useable portion of the table.
I disabled my Z axis homing bacause I had to remove the limit switch to install my new Z axis ball screw. I probably won't reactivate it because it is such a pain.
Incidentally, years ago I had a large Bridegport knee mill with a table that went on forever. That was not a CNC machine, but I can tell you that probably 90% of the time, I used only about 12 to 18" of the middle of the X travel. I can see an advantage to having homing based on that envelope and just turn off homing an reset manually on the rare occations when I needed the whole table.