I don't know where this iidea comes from that no other axis can move while A moves.
G1 X1 A3600 cuts dandy 10tpi threads
G1 X1 X72000 turns at .005 feed
I run the A 'continuously' now by calcing the number of turns I want, feeding that in with a G command and then clearing the A.
Unfortunately, my little power supply kicked the bucket before I could get video on the nifty face off and then thread program I had working.
This already works fine, I'm just looking for a better way. Swapping axis won't work for me becuase I still need the X,Y, and Z active.
The grand scheme here is to make a mini-machining center . . of sorts. I have it working, it's just down to refinement.
What I would like is
1) simply a way to reset A to machine 0 rather than just work offset 0. SO far this has not been a practical limitation for what I am doing becuse I've gotten machine A into the 10s of millions, so there is enouh headroom for my simply programs.
2) a simple script or brain that would use the stored feedrate variable and use it to convert the A travel to whatever number of degrees reqwuired for rotations to accomplish the feed for the distance commanded and pass that to the G command as an A number.
Example: Mach has stored somewhere the feed per rev of say .004. I want to turn .020 off a workpiece for a distance of .6 inches. All of the data is availble for Mach to calculate the number of turns (in degrees) the A axis needs to move accomplish the cut. It is just going to have to wait until I have time to dig into the scripting and/or brains of Mach unless I can find a willing guru in the mean time to help out.