I had a dream....

Many years ago I had an idea to use a computer to control a linear positioning system. I bought a couple of stepper motors from Maplin in the UK and started to hook these up to my 8 bit PIO card. Harnessing the full power of Window 98 and Turbo Pascal, I excitedly hooked up some simple gears to the stepper motors and a piece of M8 threaded rod... it twitched slightly and NOTHING!!!.
It turned out that I had massively underestimated the torque of the tiny motors.

To be clear, I'm not saying there was anything wrong with the motors - they were really easy to get going and quite reasonably priced. With no load, they trundled nicely clockwise and anticlockwise. I had a lot of fun with these learning about stepper motor sequencing etc but my expectations regarding what they could drive were just all wrong - I had set the bar way too high for myself and so, the motors went back in a box, the M8 threaded rod and bearings went back in the garage.

Over time, the bits were recycled but I kept finding the old piece of wood with my "linear bearing" (a piece of aluminium tube with another slightly larger diameter section fitted on the outside + the M8 rod.... there must be a better way of doing this.