Newbie looking at 6040 (China CNC) for polypropylene 15mm sheet

[spluppit]

I nearly put in that i have zero experience of Mach of any kind. I was just drawing from my general experience of commercial controllers and especially ones with manual tool change like knee mills as an example. Some do accommodate out of position moves some don't. Mach will only be based on commercial controllers features. Looking at Jogaras reply from the mach forums it seems this was the case from what he said.

[Neale]

I nearly put in that i have zero experience of Mach of any kind. I was just drawing from my general experience of commercial controllers and especially ones with manual tool change like knee mills as an example. Some do accommodate out of position moves some don't. Mach will only be based on commercial controllers features. Looking at Jogaras reply from the mach forums it seems this was the case from what he said.

Whether or not Mach3, or its predecessor which then became LinuxCNC via a different development path, is based on commercial systems isn't really the issue - it supports the M6 toolchange command, and allows the user to add in a couple of macros that are called automatically before and after the toolchange itself. When it's working, it also allows things like tool-height setting using a touchplate during the toolchange, which is really useful on amateur-class machines which do not have preset calibrated toolholders and the like. It supports that way of working as well, but is a bit more flexible. However, as mentioned, when you are using an external motion controller, it can get confused if the motion controller does things Mach3 doesn't know about. I would certainly suggest trying an earlier version and general reports agree that .028 is a good bet.

[JAZZCNC]

I nearly put in that i have zero experience of Mach of any kind. I was just drawing from my general experience of commercial controllers and especially ones with manual tool change like knee mills as an example. Some do accommodate out of position moves some don't. Mach will only be based on commercial controllers features. Looking at Jogaras reply from the mach forums it seems this was the case from what he said.

Actually Mach3 isn't based on commercial controllers which is exactly why it became so popular because it did it's own thing without any of the restrictions commercial controllers imposed. However this eventually became it's downfall and why it as so many strange and wonderful habbits today.
As people requested more and more features for more and more oddball setups then because Art fennerty was such an obliging bloke it became a monster.
Each version that got released to take account of someone's request would break something for someone else. On top of this Art wasn't actually a programmer by trade just a genius who decided to have go because couldn't find a controller that did what he wanted. This meant the code was lets say less than easy to fathom for developers.
This is why so many external motion controllers fail because they don't have artsofts support and the code is mine field which tried to be All things to All machines and in lots ways won but in others failed badly.

All this said the fact remains that Mach3 DOES allow jogging in tool changes so it should work. If it doesn't then it's most likely down to the controllers plug-in.
Yes there are always work arounds but shouldn't have to in this case if the controller plug-in was working correctly.