I think he wants to be able to do some work in there with his hands, and not have the cutter in the way. so he would like the machine to go to a safe position when a button is pressed, let him get in there and move clamps, remove chips, whatever hes doing, and then press the button again to get back to where he was in the program. The VB script would need to save the current position and line in the program, go to a safe z, then go to x0y0, and on the next press of the button go back to that position on the xy then z before finally resuming the program at the line it stopped on. i don't know how to do this, but thought we should think about what the problem really is first and hope that i have interpreted it correctly. isnt it easy to write this data to a text file and read it later in VB? you might not even have to save what line you are on if you can call the feed hold button from the VB script and just be exactly in the same spot when you resume- the program should just still be at that line. also, turning off the spindle would be required im sure.