Robert Hopp's terrific perforator system sounds ideal to me. The idea
of a one-fingered Mot-zart zipping back and forth may sound a little
"off-the-wall" until one looks at the way it is constructed. That thing
should play until the cows come home! There is nothing like linear
bearings for precision!  Any lost motion caused by clearance or
tolerance is divided by the number of balls contacting the shaft at any
given time, and that happens to be dozens!  So for all practical
purposes, the lost motion is zero! And strength? Those things will
support a tractor trailer! I have seen huge copy cameras weighing tons,
whose copy platen is supported by just four of them, and whose overall
precision is just a few thousandths of an inch in ten feet of travel.
So that sounds like a good basic system, to me.

Also, he is apparently not relying on the wooden frame for alignment,
but rather a steel "U" frame that contains all the punching mechanism.
My one question about the software and operation of the machine is
this: Does it punch from both directions (+ & - Y)  or just one
direction?  Regardless of the answer, this sounds like a great
machine.

Craig B.