Hi Friends,

I have been lurking on this forum for a few months but this is my first post. A little background, I'm an M.E working as a design engineer now but have had positions that have allowed me to gain a decent amount of experience machining and maintenance machines like this, but this is my first one I've "built" if you can call it that.

I recently assembled a Queen Bee CNC kit (link below) with the intention of turning it into a tangential knife plotter. I couldn't find anything affordable off the shelf so i designed the cutter head assembly myself. I designed it with pneumatic linear actuators on it that have about 1.5" throw. The logic is/was that when it is running a program the Z can be really close to the media and never have to move in the positive direction when a line is done or that minimum angle threshold is exceeded. Rather with my assembly it could just retract the actuators, adjust the angle, redeploy the cutting head, and continue cutting. This assembly does require a pneumatic solenoid valve, I chose a DC one, (link below). This is contrast to having the Z motor work at all when the machine is running a program, with my design the Z should have a running program mode and a not running program mode, where the head is high and out of the way. (screenshot of the assembly attached to this post).


I have just finished assembling the CNC kit and plumbed the wires for the motor limit switches and air but I am about to start wiring the electrical cabinet and discovered after reading the UC300 manual (and looking at a lot of other posts about similar issues , the manual doesn't have a lot of information on this) that the tangential function in Mach 3 seems to use the Z axis for the function that the linear actuator serve in the above paragraph. I have a few questions before I proceed with buying any licenses or more hardware.

- Did i mess up by adding the linear actuators lol
- Is what i am describing possible in mach 3, can i write custom post processing code that does this
- are there any pins that are either unused or i can splice into to control the solenoid (24v DC)


Any insight is greatly appreciated

Solenoid:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SZJ31Y6...t_details&th=1

CNC Kit:
https://bulkman3d.com/product/queenb...-rail-upgrade/