I have considered other motors that I have (although a cordless drill has not among them so far) but the idea here is to have the precision of the stepper that can be controlled through code that can give a readout of the feed rate on the LCD. Yes - for a small hobby shop like mine doing it by feel works just fine and I could certainly make something like that work, but a big stepper is less than $40 so the investment is not too high. This is about 70% a fun academic exercise and 30% need for the shop. Truth be told, most of the time that applies to whatever I am doing out there!Another possible for a DIY motor is a cordless drill driver. The battery is usually the first thing to go and replavcements are almost the cost of a new drilldriver so they are just chicked out. Typical speeds will drive the lead screw at better than 100 ipm. You have variable speed forward and reverse electronics built in. All you need to do is supply d.c. power and replace the trigger and reversing switch with a remote setup.
I was able to fix it. There was a cracked soldering joint. I've documented this in another thread.I just installed a Vevor power feed on my mill, last week, I was initially impressed with the apparent quality for only $129.00 But Yikes! Sorry to hear yours crapped out so soon, I was hoping to get at least 10 years out of it.
One thing I remember from the sparse instructions, It said if it "overloads" to cycle the on off switch to reset it. Don't know if you tried that but it might work.