good afternoon gents. i'm thinking of building a plasma, router and drilling cnc machine utilising mach4 and a pokey57 as the control system. as you may guess i want to have three independent z axis and would like to use all the three z axis in the same cam program, instead of having to run three programs to do the same job. i have read a lot of different views, like swapaxis command, which i'm yet to find out how to do. use m6 tool change, but i,m unsure how to do the offsets for each tool. Or will i have to learn LUA script to do what i want to do. If so  can anyone recommend a good g code,macro, lua book that would cover this subject.

here:
https://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=33866.0

is some Information about maping unmapping Motors.

and the Offset for the three "Tools" can be done with G52

Hi,
if thinking of using Mach4 then this post probably belongs on the Mach4 General discussion board, no doubt tweakie will shift it there
if needed.

Mach4 as six coordinated axes with up to four slave on each, and six out-of-band (OB) axes again with up to four slaves on each.

One of the OB axes is nominally the spindle axis, that is to say it has the regular Mcodes like M3,M4,M5 and speed code Snnn.
As such this nominal spindle axis is ideal for a free running spindle in either drilling or routing. The other OB axes can all be accessed using
jog APIs, and so while not as convenient as the 'spindle' axis, can still be used as a free running or indexing axis or spindle.

There is no need for a SwapAxis instruction, all axes can remain live, just each is called as required while the reminder are idle.

Mach4 has a low bandwidth script based THC feature which would be useful, particularly if you choose the 57CNC, as the 57CNC does not
support realtime (high bandwidth) THC. The Ethernet SmoothStepper has direct support for a TMC plasma module which provides
realtime (high bandwidth) THC with sophisticated anti-dive strategies and is preferred for Plasma ops.

Craig