Hi,
I have a ski workshop with friend and I am looking for update on my customized wood planner.
You can look at the cnc planner in action in this video (at 01:00) : http://vimeo.com/79183029

I use this planner to make my wood-core thickness profile. The thickness profile define how the stiffness of the ski on the length.

I did mechanical adaptation on a commercial metabo planner. I remove the hand wheel and place a drive it with a servo motor.
In this king of machine there is an automatic material advance. So I place a wheel with an encoder to mesure the advance of the material.
So I have motorized X axis and a continuous advance on X axis that I can measure
Then I made a custom labview program to control the Z axis depending on the location of the material on the X axis. I have a relationship Z=f(X)

Can I do this with mach3? It means I need a configuration where the Z axis is slave of X axis. Is it possible?

I would like to change the software to be able to make complex thickness profile.

Hello friend,
  If you could convert your feed roll drive from the cutter head motor reduction, and affix a servo motor similar to what you did for the thickness control, your possibilities with Mach3 would be astounding.
You could use any low level CAD/CAM to generate virtually any profile  and control the feed rates as well.
Multi-pass for heavier stock removal, Roughing then finishing passes . Jogging ..... on and on.

To track with your existing encoder wheel, I'm not sure, but probably is possible altho more complex ... for me anyway.

I like your nice clean shop !

Regards,
Russ

Nice machine!
If you define your machine like a Horizontal Milling machine in your CAM package you could define absolutely any profile you wanted, even profiles which would prove extremely complex to express where Z is a function of X,
Regards,
Nick

" I have a relationship Z=f(X)"

Mach3 has a formula function which may work for your needs.
See Function CFg's. > Formulas

John Champlain